Twelve‐month‐olds’ comprehension and production of pointing

Behne, Tanya; Liszkowski, Ulf; Carpenter, Malinda; Tomasello, Michael

doi:10.1111/j.2044-835x.2011.02043.x

Cited by 178 publications

(139 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…This tendency to trust some informants more than others is called ''selective trust.'' Human infants begin to understand and produce pointing at an early stage in their first year of life (Behne et al 2012). Pointing is such a conventional communicative gesture that young children have difficulty interpreting it in a novel, unconventional way.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do dogs follow behavioral cues from an unreliable human?

et al. 2014

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Dogs are known to consistently follow human pointing gestures. In this study, we asked whether dogs "automatically" do this or whether they flexibly adjust their behavior depending upon the reliability of the pointer, demonstrated in an immediately preceding event. We tested pet dogs in a version of the object choice task in which a piece of food was hidden in one of the two containers. In Experiment 1, Phase 1, an experimenter pointed at the baited container; the second container was empty. In Phase 2, after showing the contents of both containers to the dogs, the experimenter pointed at the empty container. In Phase 3, the procedure was exactly as in Phase 1. We compared the dogs' responses to the experimenter's pointing gestures in Phases 1 and 3. Most dogs followed pointing in Phase 1, but many fewer did so in Phase 3. In Experiment 2, dogs followed a new experimenter's pointing in Phase 3 following replication of procedures of Phases 1 and 2 in Experiment 1. This ruled out the possibility that dogs simply lost motivation to participate in the task in later phases. These results suggest that not only dogs are highly skilled at understanding human pointing gestures, but also they make inferences about the reliability of a human who presents cues and consequently modify their behavior flexibly depending on the inference.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Do dogs follow behavioral cues from an unreliable human?

et al. 2014

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“…In one study [24], an experimenter pointed to one of two boxes, each containing a hidden toy, to request it from infants. Seventeen-montholds had no problem inferring that the point to the opaque box referred to the object inside (and not to the box itself; for similar results with 12-month-olds, see [25]). However, when the objects were swapped unbeknownst to the experimenter, and she then pointed to a box, infants apparently inferred the object she had in mind, namely the one that was now in the other box, and offered that object.…”

Section: (A) Comprehensionmentioning

confidence: 68%

Two sources of meaning in infant communication: preceding action contexts and act-accompanying characteristics

Liszkowski

2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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How do infants communicate before they have acquired a language? This paper supports the hypothesis that infants possess social–cognitive skills that run deeper than language alone, enabling them to understand others and make themselves understood. I suggested that infants, like adults, use two sources of extralinguistic information to communicate meaningfully and react to and express communicative intentions appropriately. In support, a review of relevant experiments demonstrates, first, that infants use information from preceding shared activities to tailor their comprehension and production of communication. Second, a series of novel findings from our laboratory shows that in the absence of distinguishing information from preceding routines or activities, infants use accompanying characteristics (such as prosody and posture) that mark communicative intentions to extract and transmit meaning. Findings reveal that before infants begin to speak they communicate in meaningful ways by binding preceding and simultaneous multisensory information to a communicative act. These skills are not only a precursor to language, but also an outcome of social–cognitive development and social experience in the first year of life.

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“…By 1 year of age, infants begin pointing to absent, or experientially defined, referents making it clear that they understand that pointing is not simply a cue for attracting another's attention to a specific object, but instead is a means to orient them mentally to some shared representation. Also, infants begin to show comprehension of pointing, which requires more than merely following the direction of a point; infants search for invisibly displaced objects in locations that are specified by an adult's point, and search even longer when the object is not found at the pointed location (Behne, Liszkowski, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2012;Gliga & Csibra, 2009). An especially compelling example of how infants comprehend pointing in terms of a shared understanding was reported by Liebal, Behne, Carpenter, and Tomasello (2009) who showed that 14-and 18-month-old infants interpreted an adult's pointing gesture differently depending on whether or not this individual had been involved with the infant in a previous activity.…”

Section: Point Following Versus Point Comprehensionmentioning

confidence: 97%