Abstract
Two experiments compared the role of tactile and deictic gestures in children's acquisition of adjectives. Children were taught novel adjective terms (e.g., spongy) pertaining to a target toy, accompanied for 1 group of children by a relevant descriptive gesture (e.g., squeezing) and by a point gesture for another group. Children then chose a toy from test sets consisting of a matching-property and nonmatching-property toy. The descriptive gesture group children chose the toy with the matching property significantly more often than the point gesture group children. Among point gesture group children, utterances on teaching and test trials suggested greater uncertainty and consideration of nontarget properties. These results underscore the role of nonverbal sociopragmatic factors in early word learning.
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