Poster #108 - Children spontaneously recreate core properties of language in a new modality

• In Event: 2-163 - Poster Session 08
  In Poster Session: PS 08 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

Children acquire language at an extraordinary speed with the help of adult speakers. However, when new languages emerge, no such scaffolding is in place. In such a situation, communicative partners are "on equal terms" and jointly create and shape their emerging communication system. It is widely thought that the emergence of language-like structures in new communication systems is a lengthy process of cultural evolution. Here we approximate the beginning of this process by studying how dyads of young children, with little to no formal schooling, create a new communication system in the gestural modality.

We investigated how dyads of same aged, normally developing children spontaneously create and transmit novel communicative signals to solve a coordination problem. Children played a game in which one child had to communicate to the other which of 5 pictures needs to be selected (see Fig. 1). Four pictures depicted actions (e.g. eating) and one picture was blank (“nothing”). Each child was in a different room and communication was possible via an audio/video connection (akin to a Skype conversation). At some point during the game, the experimenters switched of the audio connection so that children could no longer hear one another but were still able to see each other. To continue the game, children had to spontaneously create gestures to communicate the content of the pictures to their partner. With this setup we addressed the following four questions: 1) Do children spontaneously create and understand gestures? 2) Are they able to create gestures for abstract concepts (“nothing”) 3) Do they converge on the same gestures? 4) Do gestures become more abstract over time? Similar processes have been observed in more naturalistic settings, most prominently in Nicaraguan Sign Language (see e.g. Senghas, Kita, & Özyürek, 2004).

Our results show that dyads of four and six-year old peers (N = 48) spontaneously invented and understood iconic gestures for actions as well as for abstract concepts (Fig. 2). Furthermore, children from the same dyad produced more similar gestures compared to children from different dyads (based on adult ratings). This suggest that children quickly formed local referential conventions. Children also produced more arbitrary gestures over time, presumably by reducing production effort. In a follow-up study, we tested six and eight-year-olds (N = 96) in the same setup with pictures showing objects with different properties (varying in size, number or how they moved) as well as with pictures showing transitive actions between agents (e.g. “cat chasing monkey” vs. “monkey chasing cat”). Preliminary results suggest that children successfully communicate these concepts by using grammatical markers (for properties) and word order (for transitive actions). Taken together, these studies show that children spontaneously recreate some of the core properties of language in a new modality. This demonstrates the resilience and flexibility of human communicative abilities.

Authors

• Manuel Bohn, Stanford University & Leipzig University
  Presenting Author

• Gregor Kachel, FH Potsdam
  Non-Presenting Author

• Michael Tomasello, Duke University
  Non-Presenting Author