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. 2019 May;46(3):433-458.
doi: 10.1017/S0305000918000557. Epub 2019 Jan 18.

Learning speech-internal cues to pronoun interpretation from co-speech gesture: a training study

Whitney Goodrich Smith  1 , Alexis K Black  1 , Carla L Hudson Kam  1
Affiliations

Learning speech-internal cues to pronoun interpretation from co-speech gesture: a training study

Whitney Goodrich Smith et al. J Child Lang. 2019 May.

Abstract

This study explores whether children can learn a structural processing bias relevant to pronoun interpretation from brief training. Over three days, 42 five-year-olds were exposed to narratives exhibiting a first-mentioned tendency. Two characters were introduced, and the first-mentioned was later described engaging in a solo activity. In our primary condition of interest, the Gesture Training condition, the solo-activity sentence contained an ambiguous pronoun, but co-speech gesture clarified the referent. There were two comparison conditions. In the Gender Training condition the characters were different genders, thereby avoiding ambiguity. In the Name Training condition, the first-mentioned name was simply repeated. Ambiguous pronoun interpretation was tested pre- and post-training. Children in the Gesture condition were significantly more likely to interpret ambiguous pronouns as the first-mentioned character after training. Results from the comparison conditions were ambiguous: there was a small but non-significant effect of training, but also no significant differences between conditions.

Keywords: gesture; processing biases; pronoun interpretation; training.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Example gestures from the Gesture condition narratives: (A) Localizing Gesture with first-mentioned name, (B) Localizing Gesture with second-mentioned name, and (C) (first-mentioned) Co-referential.*Copied from Goodrich Smith and Hudson Kam (2015)
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Proportion first-mentioned responses Pre- and Post-Training by condition. (In this and the following figure, the lower and upper hinges on the boxes correspond to the first and third quartiles (the 25th and 75th percentiles). Whiskers extend to the highest (or lowest) actual data point no further than 1.5 * the inter-quartile range away from the hinge. When they occur, dark solid lines inside the boxes represent the median.)
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Proportion prompted responses Pre- and Post-Training by condition.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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