Department of Psychology, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL 60660, USA.
Department of Medical Social Sciences, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, IL 60611, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2021 May;205:105069. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2020.105069. Epub 2021 Jan 11.
To learn from others, children rely on cues (e.g., familiarity, confidence) to infer who around them will provide useful information. We extended this research to ask whether children will use an informant's inclination to gesture as a marker of whether or not the informant is a good person to learn from. Children (N = 459, ages 4-12 years) watched short videos in which actresses made statements accompanied by meaningful iconic gestures, beat gestures (which act as prosodic markers with speech), or no gestures. After each trial, children were asked "Who do you think would be a good teacher?" (good teacher [experimental] condition) or "Who do you think would be a good friend?" (good friend [control] condition). Results show that children do believe that someone who produces iconic gesture would make a good teacher compared with someone who does not, but this is only later in childhood and only if children have the propensity to see gesture as meaningful. The same effects were not found in the good friend condition, indicating that children's responses are not just about liking an adult who gestures more. These findings have implications for how children attend to and learn from instructional gesture.
为了向他人学习，儿童依赖线索（例如熟悉度、信心）来推断周围的人谁会提供有用的信息。我们将这项研究扩展到询问儿童是否会将信息提供者的手势倾向作为判断该信息提供者是否是一个值得学习的人的标志。（N=459，年龄 4-12 岁）儿童观看了女演员在发表陈述时伴有有意义的象征性手势、节拍手势（与言语一起充当韵律标记）或没有手势的短视频。在每次试验后，儿童被问及“你认为谁会是一个好老师？”（实验组，好老师）或“你认为谁会是一个好朋友？”（对照组，好朋友）。结果表明，与不做手势的人相比，儿童确实认为做象征性手势的人会成为一个好老师，但这只是在儿童后期才会发生，而且只有当他们有将手势视为有意义的倾向时才会发生。在好朋友的条件下没有发现相同的效果，这表明儿童的反应不仅仅是喜欢手势更多的成年人。这些发现对于儿童如何关注和从教学手势中学习具有启示意义。
