Verb generalization of preschool-aged children, experimental data 2018-2019

During the fellowship, I will collect data from one experiment with 3-year-old children that will help us to better understand how seeing iconic gestures facilitates word learning. I will visit local nurseries to play a computer-based word learning game with 96 children. I will publish my research findings from this experiment and from my PhD dissertation in two top-tier scientific journals in developmental psychology and I will present those research findings at one international conference on cognitive development, in Budapest, Hungary.

I will also develop a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellowship proposal that extends my PhD research. I will design a series of lab-based experiments that help us investigate how parents can use nonverbal communication (e.g. facial expressions, body language, and hand gestures) to teach their child new words. I will propose to analyse body position of the parent and child (face-to-face or side-by-side) and eye contact, touch, and gestures.

Moreover, I will visit two internationally leading research groups to develop collaborative research on mother-child interactions. I will visit Simone Pika's biocognition lab, which has collected video recordings of naturalistic social interactions between chimpanzee mothers and their young living in the wild. I will also visit with Susan Goldin-Meadow's gesture lab, which has collected video recordings of naturalistic interactions between parents and children in their family homes.<br><br>Data record at UK Data Service consists of a single README file.

Data record on the Open Science Framework (OSF) consists of a zip file, organised into subfolders according to data type, and another README file. This study investigated whether seeing iconic gestures depicting verb referents promotes two types of generalization. We taught 3-4-year-olds novel locomotion verbs.

Children who saw iconic manner gestures during training generalized more verbs to novel events (first-order generalization) than children who saw interactive gestures (Exp. 1, N = 48; Exp. 2, N = 48) and path-tracing gestures (Exp. 3, N = 48). Furthermore, immediately (Exp. 1 & 3) and after one week (Exp. 2), the iconic manner gesture group outperformed the control groups in subsequent generalization trials with different novel verbs (second-order generalization), although all groups saw interactive gestures.

Thus, seeing iconic gestures that depict verb referents helps children (1) generalize individual verb meanings to novel events and (2) learn more verbs from the same sub-category.