Innovation and enculturation in child communication: a cross-sectional study

Lister, Casey J.; Walker, Bradley; Fay, Nicolas

doi:10.1017/ehs.2020.57

Cited by 7 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 55 publications

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“…This may lead younger children to create idiosyncratic signs that are difficult to interpret. Supporting this, Lister, Walker, and Fay (2020) found that younger children tend to create signs that are more diverse and idiosyncratic than the signs of older children (i.e., are less enculturated). We speculate that, in addition to being able to create more motivated signs, older children's greater communication success may have resulted from a combination of their greater concept knowledge, their greater enculturation (increasing shared knowledge and the overlap in signs they find salient, relative to other members of their society), and their greater ability to infer others' mental states and use this to inform sign creation.…”

Section: Successful Communication: Motivated Signs Are Just the Beginningmentioning

confidence: 80%

A Cross‐Sectional Test of Sign Creation by Children in the Gesture and Vocal Modalities

et al. 2021

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Naturalistic studies show that children can create language-like communication systems in the absence of conventional language. However, experimental evidence is mixed. We address this discrepancy using an experimental paradigm that simulates naturalistic sign creation. Specifically, we tested if a sample of 6-to 12-yearold children (52 girls and 56 boys drawn from an urban, predominantly white population in Western Australia) can comprehend and create novel gestural and vocal signs. Experiment 1 tested children's ability to comprehend novel signs. Experiment 2 tested children's ability to create novel signs. Results show that children can comprehend and create gestural and vocal signs, that communication is more successful in the gesture modality, and that older children outperform younger children.We are grateful to three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and thorough feedback on the manuscript.

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Section: Successful Communication: Motivated Signs Are Just the Beginningmentioning

confidence: 80%

A Cross‐Sectional Test of Sign Creation by Children in the Gesture and Vocal Modalities

et al. 2021

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“…[39]; for a review, see [134]; but see [135]). These findings have since been replicated in children [136,137].…”

Section: Pantomimic Fossilsmentioning

confidence: 82%

Pantomimic fossils in modern human communication

Żywiczyński

Wacewicz

Lister

2021

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Bodily mimesis, the capacity to use the body representationally, was one of the key innovations that allowed early humans to go beyond the ‘baseline’ of generalized ape communication and cognition. We argue that the original human-specific communication afforded by bodily mimesis was based on signs that involve three entities: an expression that represents an object (i.e. communicated content) for an interpreter . We further propose that the core component of this communication, pantomime, was able to transmit referential information that was not limited to select semantic domains or the ‘here-and-now’, by means of motivated—most importantly iconic—signs. Pressures for expressivity and economy then led to conventionalization of signs and a growth of linguistic characteristics: semiotic systematicity and combinatorial expression. Despite these developments, both naturalistic and experimental data suggest that the system of pantomime did not disappear and is actively used by modern humans. Its contemporary manifestations, or pantomimic fossils , emerge when language cannot be used, for instance when people do not share a common language, or in situations where the use of (spoken) language is difficult, impossible or forbidden. Under such circumstances, people bootstrap communication by means of pantomime and, when these circumstances persist, newly emergent pantomimic communication becomes increasingly language-like. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Reconstructing prehistoric languages’.

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“…The fact that signal universality was positively associated with communication success contributed to the greater success of gesture, compared to vocalization. Consistent with this finding, (hearing and non-signing) adults’ success in interpreting sign language is predicted by the degree to which their gestures resemble the signs from sign language [66] (see also [67]), and children's success in using gesture to communicate is predicted by the degree to which their gestures resemble the gestures of others [50].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 79%

“…However, a recent study indicates that the greater universality of gestured signals (i.e. the degree to which different people produce similar signals to convey the same meaning) may also contribute to their communication success [50]. In this study, children's communication success was positively correlated with the extent to which their spontaneous signals (gesture or vocal) resembled the signals produced by adults for the same meaning, and because signal universality was higher for gestured signals than for vocal signals communication success was higher in the gesture modality.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gesture is the primary modality for language creation

et al. 2022

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How language began is one of the oldest questions in science, but theories remain speculative due to a lack of direct evidence. Here, we report two experiments that generate empirical evidence to inform gesture-first and vocal-first theories of language origin; in each, we tested modern humans' ability to communicate a range of meanings (995 distinct words) using either gesture or non-linguistic vocalization. Experiment 1 is a cross-cultural study, with signal Producers sampled from Australia ( n = 30, M age = 32.63, s.d. = 12.42) and Vanuatu ( n = 30, M age = 32.40, s.d. = 11.76). Experiment 2 is a cross-experiential study in which Producers were either sighted ( n = 10, M age = 39.60, s.d. = 11.18) or severely vision-impaired ( n = 10, M age = 39.40, s.d. = 10.37). A group of undergraduate student Interpreters guessed the meaning of the signals created by the Producers ( n = 140). Communication success was substantially higher in the gesture modality than the vocal modality (twice as high overall; 61.17% versus 29.04% success). This was true within cultures, across cultures and even for the signals produced by severely vision-impaired participants. The success of gesture is attributed in part to its greater universality (i.e. similarity in form across different Producers). Our results support the hypothesis that gesture is the primary modality for language creation.

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Innovation and enculturation in child communication: a cross-sectional study

Abstract: Abstract

Cited by 7 publications

References 55 publications

A Cross‐Sectional Test of Sign Creation by Children in the Gesture and Vocal Modalities

A Cross‐Sectional Test of Sign Creation by Children in the Gesture and Vocal Modalities

Pantomimic fossils in modern human communication

Gesture is the primary modality for language creation

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