Poster #40 - Parents’ Use of Nouns, Pronouns, and Nonverbal Social Cues in Everyday Play Settings

• In Event: Poster Session 19

Abstract

Parents’ speech and gestures to children differ based on the subject and the interaction. For example, parents’ use of nouns versus pronouns in speech varies depending on whether children can see the referent or know the referent label (Matthews et al., 2006). Pronouns and labels include variations in their level of referential ambiguity (e.g., “Give me that” versus “Give me the shoe”). Pointing and showing gestures (i.e., nonverbal social cues) can aid in indicating a referent in the immediate environment and disambiguating it from other distractors. The current project investigates parents' use of pronouns versus nouns and nonverbal social cues in daily interactions with their children. The study aims to examine 1) the differences in parents' use of nonverbal social cues when labeling using nouns versus pronouns and 2) whether parents' pairing of social cues predicts children's productive vocabulary.

The study will examine 16 two-hour, semi-naturalistic play interactions between typically developing English-speaking infants (Mage = 22.94 months; 8 females) and their parents from a subset of The Science of Everyday Play corpus (Tamis-LeMonda & Adolph, 2017) in the Databrary database (Gilmore et al., 2016). Productive vocabulary measures for each participant were collected using the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (MCDI; Fenson et al., 1994).

We will code the transcripts for 1) nouns and pronouns and their referents physically present in the child’s immediate environment. Pronouns are defined as either replacements if they replaced nouns (e.g., “There it is!”; “it” referring to “ball”) or determiners if they modified nouns (e.g., “This ball.”). 2) Nonverbal gestures (pointing and showing) and their referents. We define pointing gestures as an extended index finger gesture toward an area or an object that has the potential to direct the child’s attention, and showing as a hand in contact with an object that has the potential to direct the child's attention. Nonverbal gestures are coded both when they co-occurred with language and when they occur independently of speech.

To answer the first research question, we will run two logistic mixed effect models to analyze the relationship between nouns versus pronouns (predictor variables) and showing and pointing gestures (the outcome variables in their respective models). Both models will include nouns and pronouns as fixed effects and participant as a random effect. In addition, a linear regression will analyze how parents' use of social cues predicts children’s vocabulary size. MCDI scores for each participant will be the outcome measure for this analysis and parts of speech (noun versus pronoun) and type of gesture (showing versus pointing) will be the predictor variables (aggregated for each participant).

By highlighting the relationship between verbal and nonverbal social cues parents use with their toddlers in their everyday environment, this study will provide insights on whether parents' social cues are redundant, complementary (e.g., using non-verbal social cues to compensate for ambiguities in their speech), or non-predictive. Furthermore, examining the relationship between social cues and children's burgeoning vocabulary will reveal how parents integrate language and social cues to create word learning.

Authors

• Emily Neer, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Erjing Zhang, University of California - Los Angeles

• Catherine Sandhofer, University of California - Los Angeles