Gestures as a Potential Cue to Children's Verb Learning

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Nicoladis, Elena

• SSHRC Awarded IG 2012: Verbs are harder than nouns for children to learn. This research project will test two central hypotheses about verb learning in children: First, in experimental situations, children benefit from co-speech gesture as shown by enhanced verb learning. Second, in everyday interaction, children use the co-speech gesture they observe to discern the meaning of verbs. Evaluation of these claims will enable us to identify the effectiveness of co-speech gesture as a support for a particularly challenging area of language acquisition.

  We have designed both experimental and observational studies to address our central questions: First, can children use gestures to support verb learning? Second, do children use gestures to support verb learning? We anticipate that the results of these studies will reveal that co-speech gesture can be used experimentally to enhance verb learning, and further that children whose parents use co-speech gesture have a linguistic advantage.

• Date created

  2011-10-13

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Communications
  • Language acquisition
  • IG
  • Linguistics
  • SSHRC Grants
  • Verbs
  • 2012
  • Adolescents
  • Learning
  • Insight Grant
  • Successful SSHRC Grant
  • Child
  • Psychology
  • Gesture

• Type of Item

  Research Material

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3X868

• License

  Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International