Progressive Reduction of Iconic Gestures Contributes to School-Aged Children's Increased Word Production.

ABSTRACT: The economic principle of communication, according to which successful communication can be reached by least effort, has been studied for verbal communication. With respect to nonverbal behavior, it implies that forms of iconic gestures change over the course of communication and become reduced in the sense of less pronounced. These changes and their effects on learning are currently unexplored in relevant literature. Addressing this research gap, we conducted a word learning study to test the effects of changing gestures on children's slow mapping. We applied a within-subject design and tested 51 children, aged 6.7 years (SD = 0.4), who learned unknown words from a story. The storyteller acted on the basis of two conditions: In one condition, in which half of the target words were

SUBMITTER: Mertens UJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8107226 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature