Adults' social cues facilitate young children's use of signs and symbols

Developmental Science, 2010

Three experiments investigated the effect of an adult’s social cues on 2- and 3-year-old children’s ability to use a sign or symbol to locate a hidden object. Results showed that an adult’s positive, engaging facial expression facilitated children’s ability to identify the correct referent, particularly for 3-year-olds. A neutral facial expression and the presence of the adult’s hand also facilitated performance, but to a lesser degree than did an engaging facial expression. The effect of the adult’s social cues was greater for relatively unfamiliar signs and symbols (replica or arrow) than it was for a more familiar sign (pointing finger). These findings indicate that non-directional social cues such as facial expression help to convey communicative intent and facilitate children’s comprehension of signs and symbols.

Early Child Development and Care, 2016

Social skills and symbol skills are positively associated in middle childhood, but the relation between these domains is less clear in newly verbal toddlers. Vygotsky proposed that symbols are both tools for interaction and mental tools for thought. Do symbols help even very young children build skills for interacting with and conceptualizing the social world? Longitudinal data from 108 children and mothers were collected when children were 14, 24, and 36 months. Children's gestures and words during mother–child interactions were used as symbol skill indicators to predict children's abilities to engage others and the number of social-emotional concepts children portray during play. In a series of growth models, words had a stronger effect on engagement skills whereas early gesture use predicted later development of social-emotional concepts. Therefore, even in early development, symbols serve as both communication tools and mental tools to construct understanding of the social-emotional world.

Cognition and Instruction, 2002

Journal of experimental child psychology, 2015

In two experiments, we investigated 3- to 5-year-old children's ability to use dolls and human figure drawings as symbols to map body touches. In Experiment 1, stickers were placed on different locations of children's bodies, and the children were asked to indicate the locations of the stickers using three different symbols: a doll, a human figure drawing, and the adult researcher. Performance on the tasks increased with age, but many 5-year-olds did not attain perfect performance. Surprisingly, younger children made more errors on the two-dimensional (2D) human figure drawing task compared with the three-dimensional (3D) doll and adult tasks. In Experiment 2, we compared children's ability to use 3D and 2D symbols to indicate body touch as well as to guide their search for a hidden object. We replicated the findings of Experiment 1 for the body touch task; for younger children, 3D symbols were easier to use than 2D symbols. However, the reverse pattern was found for the...

Instructional Science, 2015

Child Development, 1998

Developmental researchers recognize that multiple component skills and social processes underlie children’s communication. Infants’ gestures have catalyzed consideration of non-verbal behaviors as markers of early communicative and social competence. The current study examines infant sign and conventional gesture production to inform debate on developmental and contextual constraints on communicative competence. Based on observations over eight months, we describe the emergence timing of gestures and signs in ten infants’ spontaneous behavior. We test whether two features of gestures and signs, relative frequency of caregiver use and motoric complexity, explain variation in emergence timing. We find that while these features may constrain whether infants produce particular gestures or signs, additional explanatory mechanisms must account for the late emergence of some conventional gestures.

Journal of deaf studies …, 2008