Poster #79 - Children use communicative gesture to determine social affiliation

• In Event: Poster Session 15

Abstract

Young children use social affiliation (i.e., friendships) to understand others' behavior (Liberman et al., 2014) and guide their own (Shaw, 2016). Shared communicative cues like language or accent are particularly salient for infants and young children when determining who is most likely to affiliate (Kinzler et al., 2007). However, it is unknown whether children use gestures, hand movements that are naturally produced during communication, as another way to determine social affiliation. We know children see gesture as a meaningful part of communication (e.g., Goldin-Meadow, 2003) and that rates and types of gesture vary across individuals and cultures (Hostetter & Alibali, 2019), making gesture a plausible candidate for marking social affiliation. The current study explores whether 4-10-year-old children assume two people who both gesture are also more likely to be friends.
Currently, thirty-four children (16 females, Mage = 7.7 years) have been tested via Zoom (planned total sample = 82). Using a forced-choice friendship task, we presented children with 4 trials showing three speakers in a triangular formation (see Figure 1). Each speaker said a unique sentence (e.g., “In general, pet dogs tend to be big, and cats are usually quite small”) and either produced a representational co-speech gesture (e.g., gesturing with hands far apart when saying "big" and closer together when saying "small"), or kept their hands still. The video of the target model at the apex of the triangle was shown first, followed by videos of the two friend models at the base of the triangle. After watching all three videos, children were asked which friend model was most likely to affiliate with the target model and why. Stimulus presentations were counterbalanced for target and friend model gesture types (gesture, no gesture) and order of friend model presentation.
Preliminary analyses show that children grouped the target model with the friend model who matched communication style significantly more than would be expected from chance (t(33)= 3.03, p=.004). This effect was as strong for the trials in which the target model gestured (M=64.70% of trials) as the ones in which she did not gesture (M= 69.11% of trials). A median split based on age shows that older children (t(17) = 2.94, p= 0.009), rather than the younger children, (t(15) = 1.45, p=0.17) drive the effect, suggesting that the capacity to group friends based on gesture use may emerge later in childhood. Finally, when explaining their choices, only 11% of children explicitly mentioned gestures or hand movements. These findings provide the first piece of evidence that children use gestures as a marker of social affiliation, but that sensitivity to this cue may emerge after the age of 8, and without explicit awareness. This ongoing study marks the beginning of a line of work that will explore gesture-based social affiliation within and across languages and cultures, and probe whether children might use communicative signals like gesture to form affiliations with those who may differ from them along other salient social dimensions.

Authors

• Lauren H. Howard, Franklin & Marshall College
  Presenting Author

• Mary Schutt, Franklin & Marshall College

• Shen Wang, Franklin & Marshall College

• Elizabeth Wakefield, Loyola University Chicago

• Miriam A Novack, Northwestern University

• Eliza L Congdon, Williams College