Mertens Ulrich J, Rohlfing Katharina J
Psycholinguistics, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Paderborn University, Paderborn, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2021 Apr 26;12:651725. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.651725. eCollection 2021.
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 ( = 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 presented, the story presentation was enhanced with progressively reduced iconic gestures (PRG); in the other condition, half of the target words were accompanied by fully executed iconic gestures (FEG). To ensure a reliable gesture presentation, children were exposed to a recorded person telling a story in both conditions. We tested the slow mapping effects on children's productive and receptive word knowledge three minutes as well as two to three days after being presented the story. The results suggest that children's production of the target words, but not their understanding thereof, was enhanced by PRG.
沟通的经济原则认为，通过最少的努力就能实现成功沟通，这一原则已在言语沟通方面得到研究。就非言语行为而言，这意味着标志性手势的形式在沟通过程中会发生变化，并在不那么明显的意义上变得简化。这些变化及其对学习的影响目前在相关文献中尚未得到探讨。为了填补这一研究空白，我们进行了一项单词学习研究，以测试手势变化对儿童慢速映射的影响。我们采用了被试内设计，测试了51名6.7岁（标准差=0.4）的儿童，他们从一个故事中学习未知单词。讲述者基于两种条件进行讲述：在一种条件下，呈现一半的目标单词，故事呈现通过逐渐减少的标志性手势（PRG）得到增强；在另一种条件下，一半的目标单词伴有完整执行的标志性手势（FEG）。为了确保可靠的手势呈现，在两种条件下，儿童都观看了一个人讲故事的录像。在呈现故事三分钟以及两到三天后，我们测试了慢速映射对儿童产出性和接受性单词知识的影响。结果表明，PRG增强了儿童对目标单词的产出，但没有增强他们对目标单词的理解。
