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Young children's understanding of markedness in non-verbal communication*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2011

KRISTIN LIEBAL ,
MALINDA CARPENTER  and
MICHAEL TOMASELLO
KRISTIN LIEBAL*
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
MALINDA CARPENTER
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
MICHAEL TOMASELLO
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
*
[*]Address for correspondence: Kristin Liebal, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology – Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology, Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig D-04103, Germany. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Speakers often anticipate how recipients will interpret their utterances. If they wish some other, less obvious interpretation, they may ‘mark’ their utterance (e.g. with special intonations or facial expressions). We investigated whether two- and three-year-olds recognize when adults mark a non-verbal communicative act – in this case a pointing gesture – as special, and so search for a not-so-obvious referent. We set up the context of cleaning up and then pointed to an object. Three-year-olds inferred that the adult intended the pointing gesture to indicate that object, and so cleaned it up. However, when the adult marked her pointing gesture (with exaggerated facial expression) they took the object's hidden contents or a hidden aspect of it as the intended referent. Two-year-olds' appreciation of such marking was less clear-cut. These results demonstrate that markedness is not just a linguistic phenomenon, but rather something concerning the pragmatics of intentional communication more generally.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 38 , Issue 4 , September 2011 , pp. 888 - 903
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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