Poster #117 - Young children’s developing ability to integrate gestural and emotional cues.

• In Event: 3-159 - Poster Session 12
  In Poster Session: PS 12 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

Throughout development, children need to learn how to integrate social cues in order to make inferences about other’s communicative acts. For example, when trying to keep a young child from touching something dangerous or unpleasant, caregivers might try to point at an object and make a negative facial expression signaling fear or disgust. While this might be fairly common in adult-child interactions, little is known about young children’s general ability to comprehend proto-syntactic combinations of communicative signals from different modalities (i.e. gesture + facial expression).
In a series of three experiments, children between 22 and 46 months of age (N=180) had to integrate pointing gestures or gaze cues with positive and negative facial expressions to succeed in an object-choice-task (see Figure 1). In study 1, we compared 22-month-olds (n =40) performance in a condition where they were encouraged to avoid a target (pointing + negative facial expression) with a standard object-choice-task (pointing + positive facial expression) and found children performed better in the positive compared to the negative condition (𝛽 = -1.90, se = 0.66, p = .003). Study 2 tracked the integration of negative expressions and pointing across development testing 28-, 34-, 40- and 46-month-olds (n=80) finding an unexpected, u-shaped trajectory with group-level success only at 46 months (see Figure 2). Fitting a model with age as categorical predictor and 34 months as reference group showed that performance at 34 months was worse compared to 46 months (𝛽 = 1.76, se = 0.66, p = .008) and also trended to be below performance at 22 months (𝛽 = 1.08, se = 0.59, p = .069). The strong tendency to select the pointed to location around three years of age, suggest that early in development, pointing gestures carry an affirmative meaning and do more than just indicate a referent. This hypothesis was put to test in the third study. Here, negative facial expressions were retained but pointing gestures were replaced with communicative gazing towards the location. In this setup, children’s performance steadily increased with age (𝛽 = 0.65, se = 0.25, p = .009). Group level performance above was chance at 34 months of age, the same age they performed below chance with pointing gestures (Figure 2).
Whereas study three shows that children do not generally struggle with integrating two communicative cues, our data suggests that children up into the preschool years are prone to understand reference expressed via pointing gestures as a call to act upon an object regardless of a saliently negative emotional embedding. This has important consequences for pedagogical interactions on a day-to-day basis. Additionally, our findings show that communicative cues need to be studied in conjunction to draw an ecologically valid picture of communicative development.

Authors

• Gregor Kachel, FH Potsdam
  Presenting Author

• David Hardecker, Universität Leipzig
  Non-Presenting Author

• Manuel Bohn, Stanford University & Leipzig University
  Non-Presenting Author