We examine whether pronoun interpretation is affected by naturalistic co-speech gesture. Participants in three conditions watched narrations containing ambiguous pronouns. In one condition the narrator produced gestures consistent with order-of-mention; in another, they conflicted with order-of-mention; and in the third, she did not gesture. Results showed that when the gestures conflicted with order-of-mention participants were much less likely to interpret the pronoun as referring to the first-mentioned character. In a second experiment we ruled out the possibility that participants were simply picking up on differences within the speech itself. These results extend previous work on gesture and language processing by showing that the information in gesture can influence the way people interpret words which by their nature are ambiguous, and that this influence is similar to that of well-known speech internal cues.

This study explores whether children can use gesture to inform their interpretation of ambiguous pronouns. Specifically, we ask whether four- to eight-year-old English-speaking children are sensitive to information contained in co-referential localizing gestures in video narrations. The data show that the older (7–8 years of age) but not younger (4–5 years) children integrate co-referential gestures into their interpretation of pronouns. This is the same age at which they show sensitivity to order-of-mention, the only other cue available in the stimuli. Interestingly, when children show sensitivity to the gestures, they are quite similar to adults, in that gestures consistent with order-of-mention increase first-mentioned responses as compared to stimuli with no gestures, but only slightly, while gestures inconsistent with order-of-mention have a larger effect on interpretation, decreasing first-mentioned responses and increasing second-mentioned responses.

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.

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This paper focuses on the problem of the conventionalization of grammatical morphology during language formation, asking how a form comes to have a shared grammatical meaning in an emerging linguistic community. Results from an experiment, inspired by changes in the use of space in Nicaraguan Sign Language, are presented that demonstrate the difficulty of conventionalization for grammatical forms. We show that even in cases where meaning should be relatively easy to discern, adult listeners are not consistent, either internally or when compared to each other, in the inferences they draw. The paper ends with a discussion of the nature of the problem with respect to emerging languages more broadly, and speculates on how grammatical forms might come to have shared meanings in a newly emerging language, focussing on the role that children might play in the process.