Poster #109 - Bilingual’s Iconic Gestures: Perception, Production and Parental Influence

• In Event: 2-055 - Poster Session 06
  In Poster Session: PS 06 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

The language spoken in bilingual toddlers’ environment changes frequently depending on the situation they find themselves in and whom they speak to. Bilinguals encounter more challenging communicative situations compared to their monolingual peers (Yow & Markman, 2016) and already pre-schoolers show a heightened sensitivity to their interaction partner (Liberman et al., 2016). Furthermore, because language is a less predictable source of information, bilinguals might rely more on nonverbal cues such as gestures (Nicoladis, 2007) to infer their interlocutors’ needs. We investigated whether simultaneous bilingual pre-schoolers (N = 80; Table 1) with a broad variety of second languages show an advantage at correctly interpreting observed gestures and in producing intelligible gestures themselves. We furthermore explored whether parents of monolingual and bilingual children differed in their gesture production. That is, we assumed an increased parental gesture frequency for bilinguals supporting the importance of gestures in bilingual communication.
We assessed pre-schoolers gesture perception and production with two tasks adapted from Botting et al. (2010) and Behne et al. (2014). In the gesture perception task, the experimenter told a story while replacing the last word of her sentences with an iconic gesture. After every sentence, four different pictures were presented and the child was asked to indicate the one that matched the experimenter’s gesture. In the gesture production task, children met a deaf puppet and were asked to indicate “with their hands” which objects the puppet should give them next. Parental gesture frequency was measured by coding their gestures during a conversation (Feyereisen & Havard, 1999). Children’s performance was predicted with their language status and sex using cumulative link models (Figure 1). In the gesture perception task, monolinguals and bilinguals did not differ in their ability to match the experimenter’s gesture with the correct picture (Estimate = 0.450, SE = 0.282, p = .111). We found a main effect for sex (Estimate = 0.700, SE = 0.283, p = .013) and interaction between sex and language status (Estimate = -0.880, SE = 0.398, p = .027). Bilingual boys chose the correct picture more often than monolingual boys. No difference was found for the girls. In the gesture production task, we found no effect of language status (Estimate = 0.117, SE = 0.471, p = .018), a main effect for sex (Estimate = 0.475, SE < .001, p < .001) and no interaction between language status and sex (Estimate = -0.894, SE = 0.642, p = .163). Boys produced less intelligible gestures than girls. Finally, a regression of children’s language status on parental gesture frequency showed that parents of bilinguals gestured more than parents of monolinguals (β = 0.111, SE = 0.055, p = .047).

These results indicate that bilinguals show a heightened sensitivity to their interaction partner in reading nonverbal cues that might be due to their increased experience with challenging communication situations. The increased gesture use in parents of bilingual children might reflect the very same compensation and monitoring processes assumed in their children since also parents of bilinguals face more challenging interactions.

Authors

• Stephanie Wermelinger, University of Zurich
  Presenting Author

• anja gampe, university of zurich
  Non-Presenting Author

• Natascha Helbling, University of Zurich
  Non-Presenting Author

• Moritz M Daum, University of Zurich
  Non-Presenting Author