Abstract
Natural pedagogy is a human-specific capacity that allows us to acquire cultural information from communication even before the emergence of the first words, encompassing three core elements: (i) a sensitivity to ostensive signals like eye contact that indicate to infants that they are being addressed through communication, (ii) a subsequent referential expectation (satisfied by the use of declarative gestures) and (iii) a biased interpretation of ostensive-referential communication as conveying relevant information about the referent’s kind (Csibra and Gergely, 2006, 2009, 2011). Remarkably, the link between natural pedagogy and another human-specific capacity, namely language, has rarely been investigated in detail. We here argue that children’s production and comprehension of declarative gestures around 10 months of age are in fact expressions of an evolving faculty of language. Through both declarative gestures and ostensive signals, infants can assign the roles of third, second, and first person, building the ‘deictic space’ that grounds both natural pedagogy and language use. Secondly, we argue that the emergence of two kinds of linguistic structures (i.e., proto-determiner phrases and proto-sentences) in the one-word period sheds light on the different kinds of information that children can acquire or convey at different stages of development (namely, generic knowledge about kinds and knowledge about particular events/actions/state of affairs, respectively). Furthermore, the development of nominal and temporal reference in speech allows children to cognize information in terms of spatial and temporal relations. In this way, natural pedagogy transpires as an inherent aspect of our faculty of language, rather than as an independent adaptation that pre-dates language in evolution or development (Csibra and Gergely, 2006). This hypothesis is further testable through predictions it makes on the different linguistic profiles of toddlers with developmental disorders.
Highlights
In an article dedicated to explore some core similarities and differences between humans and nonhuman apes, Tomasello and Herrmann (2010) argue that our species have “more sophisticated cognitive skills for dealing with the social world in terms of intention-reading, social learning, and communication” (Tomasello and Herrmann, 2010, p. 5)
We would expect that particular problems in language development would be significantly associated to an atypical development of natural pedagogy
Suggesting that natural pedagogy involves sentential predicate-argument structures would go against the developmental pattern of language described in the previous section and undermine a linguistic explanation for the humanspecific capacity to acquire, through communication, different kinds of information — respectively, knowledge about kinds and knowledge about particular events, actions and state of affairs, which we will call here ‘knowledge about facts.’
Summary
Reviewed by: Yang Zhang, University of Minnesota, USA Pilar Prieto, ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain. We here argue that children’s production and comprehension of declarative gestures around 10 months of age are expressions of an evolving faculty of language. Through both declarative gestures and ostensive signals, infants can assign the roles of third,second, and first person, building the ‘deictic space’ that grounds both natural pedagogy and language use. The development of nominal and temporal reference in speech allows children to cognize information in terms of spatial and temporal relations In this way, natural pedagogy transpires as an inherent aspect of our faculty of language, rather than as an independent adaptation that predates language in evolution or development (Csibra and Gergely, 2006).
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