Journal article
Learning speech-internal cues to pronoun interpretation from co-speech gesture: a training study
Journal of child language, Vol.46(3), pp.433-458
05/01/2019
DOI: 10.1017/S0305000918000557
PMCID: PMC6436995
PMID: 30657105
Abstract
This study explores whether children can learn a structural processing bias relevant to pronoun interpretation from brief training. Over three days, 42 five-year-olds were exposed to narratives exhibiting a first-mentioned tendency. Two characters were introduced, and the first-mentioned was later described engaging in a solo activity. In our primary condition of interest, the Gesture Training condition, the solo-activity sentence contained an ambiguous pronoun, but co-speech gesture clarified the referent. There were two comparison conditions. In the Gender Training condition the characters were different genders, thereby avoiding ambiguity. In the Name Training condition, the first-mentioned name was simply repeated. Ambiguous pronoun interpretation was tested pre- and post-training. Children in the Gesture condition were significantly more likely to interpret ambiguous pronouns as the first-mentioned character after training. Results from the comparison conditions were ambiguous: there was a small but non-significant effect of training, but also no significant differences between conditions.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Learning speech-internal cues to pronoun interpretation from co-speech gesture: a training study
- Creators
- Whitney Goodrich Smith - University of British ColumbiaAlexis K. Black - University of British ColumbiaCarla L. Hudson Kam - University of British Columbia
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Journal of child language, Vol.46(3), pp.433-458
- DOI
- 10.1017/S0305000918000557
- PMID
- 30657105
- PMCID
- PMC6436995
- NLM abbreviation
- J Child Lang
- ISSN
- 0305-0009
- eISSN
- 1469-7602
- Publisher
- Cambridge Univ Press
- Number of pages
- 26
- Grant note
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) HD 048572 / National Institutes of Health; United States Department of Health & Human Services; National Institutes of Health (NIH) - USA
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 05/01/2019
- Academic Unit
- Psychological and Brain Sciences
- Record Identifier
- 9984627302502771
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