Gesture, Speech, and Attention in Adult-Child Exchanges

 

Eve V. Clark

Stanford University

 

 

Abstract

 

            Adults use gestures and speech to get and hold the attention of young children before they introduce them to new objects. In particular, they wait until the child looks at the new object, now the focus of joint attention, and then provide the child with a way of picking out that object, of referring to it. The adult issuing of a definite reference typically occurs within a half-second of the child’s gaze locking onto the object in question. Adults then use a deictic frame for making their reference (e.g., This is a Y), as is typical in adult offers of new words (Clark & Wong 2002).

            Adults use gestures not only to get children’s attention initially, but also to hold their attention over the course of the interaction. The most widely used gestures for this were points (index finger, middle finger, flattened hand), point-&-touch, with the touch prolonged, and point-&-tap, iterated. They also picked up the objects being shown, pointed at parts and other properties, and demonstrated how they moved or were used. The range of gestures produced didn’t appear to change with age between young one-year-olds (1;4-1;6) and old two-year-olds (2;9–3;0), but the adult speech accompanying these gestures did change with age. For the younger children, adults accompanied attention-holding gestures with verbal deictics like See, See this, Look, Hey, as they indicated each new part, feature, or property with a gesture. For the older children, adult gestures were accompanied with verbal labels for and descriptions of the parts and properties in question (as in See his paws, This is his mouth), as well descriptions of motion and function (He hops like this, The wheels go round).