Progressive Reduction of Iconic Gestures Contributes to School-Aged Children's Increased Word Production.

Ulrich J Mertens,Katharina J Rohlfing

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.651725

Abstract

The economic principle of communication, according to which successful communication can be reached by least effort, has been studied for verbal communication. With respect to nonverbal behavior, it implies that forms of iconic gestures change over the course of communication and become reduced in the sense of less pronounced. These changes and their effects on learning are currently unexplored in relevant literature. Addressing this research gap, we conducted a word learning study to test the effects of changing gestures on children’s slow mapping. We applied a within-subject design and tested 51 children, aged 6.7 years (SD = 0.4), who learned unknown words from a story. The storyteller acted on the basis of two conditions: In one condition, in which half of the target words were presented, the story presentation was enhanced with progressively reduced iconic gestures (PRG); in the other condition, half of the target words were accompanied by fully executed iconic gestures (FEG). To ensure a reliable gesture presentation, children were exposed to a recorded person telling a story in both conditions. We tested the slow mapping effects on children’s productive and receptive word knowledge three minutes as well as two to three days after being presented the story. The results suggest that children’s production of the target words, but not their understanding thereof, was enhanced by PRG.

Highlights

Reduction in Spoken Language and GesturesHow people structure information in speech depends on various factors, including what is assumed to be known, what kind of information is considered important, and what information the speaker wishes to focus on (e.g., Arnold et al, 2013)
Children’s performance was measured on a scale from 0 to 16 for word learning (8 points for words accompanied by progressively reduced gestures (PRG) and 8 points for words accompanied by fully executed gestures (FEG))
Multiple pairwise comparisons revealed that children achieved higher scores in Session 1 when words were presented with progressively reduced iconic gestures (PRG) than when words were accompanied with fully executed iconic gestures (FEG) (p < 0.05)

Summary

Introduction

How people structure information in speech depends on various factors, including what is assumed to be known, what kind of information is considered important, and what information the speaker wishes to focus on (e.g., Arnold et al, 2013) In this vein, studies on speech have shown that speakers exclude information when they tell a story for the second time to the same interlocutor and that stories told for the second time contain fewer details and fewer words (Galati and Brennan, 2010). When referring to the same entity repeatedly, a speaker reduces the full lexical form by replacing it with a pronoun or a zero anaphora (e.g., Fowler et al, 1997; Galati and Brennan, 2010) Another form of reduction occurs when a word is produced less intelligibly The advantage of using less information is a phenomenon already well studied and is related to the economic principle of communication (for an overview, see Arnold et al, 2013)

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