Young children's developing ability to integrate gestural and emotional cues

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In three studies, children aged 22 to 46 months (N = 180) needed to integrate pointing gestures or gaze cues with positive and negative facial expressions to succeed in an object-choice task. Finding a toy required children to either choose (positive expression) or avoid (negative expression) the indicated target. Study 1 showed that 22-month-olds are better at integrating a positive facial expression with a pointing gesture compared with a negative facial expression with a pointing gesture. Study 2 tracked the integration of negative expressions and pointing across development, finding an unexpected, U-shaped trajectory with group-level success only at 46 months. Study 3 showed that already 34-month-olds succeeded when pointing was replaced with communicative gaze. These findings suggest that at the end of the second year of life, children are generally able to integrate emotional displays and communicative cues such as gestures and ostensive gaze to reevaluate and contextualize utterances. In addition, pointing gestures appear to be understood by young children as a call to act on a referenced object. Findings illustrate that communicative cues should be studied in conjunction with emotional displays to draw an ecologically valid picture of communicative development.

Original languageEnglish
Article number104984
JournalJournal of Experimental Child Psychology
Volume201
ISSN0022-0965
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 01.01.2021
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We thank Anja Ibes for data collection, Jana Jurkat for administrative support, Jana Mahler for reliability coding, Sylvio Tüpke for the photographs, and Linda Oña for helping with the FACS coding. We are grateful to Michael Tomasello for his support throughout the study. Finally, we thank all the children and their parents for participating. Manuel Bohn was supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant (749229).

Funding Information:
We thank Anja Ibes for data collection, Jana Jurkat for administrative support, Jana Mahler for reliability coding, Sylvio Tüpke for the photographs, and Linda Oña for helping with the FACS coding. We are grateful to Michael Tomasello for his support throughout the study. Finally, we thank all the children and their parents for participating. Manuel Bohn was supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant ( 749229 ).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier Inc.

    Research areas

  • Communication, Emotion understanding, Gaze, Negation, Pointing, Social referencing
  • Psychology

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