Effekte von Objekt-Familiarisierung auf die frühe gestische Kommunikation
Individuelle Unterschiede in Hinblick auf den späteren Wortschatz
Abstract
Zusammenfassung. Für die frühe Verwendung von Gesten werden in der Forschung verschiedene Funktionen diskutiert. Zum einen wird angenommen, dass sie die kognitive Last der Situationsverarbeitung reduzieren (z. B. Goldin-Meadow & Wagner, 2005), zum anderen, dass sie genutzt werden, um Informationen von einer Bezugsperson zu elizitieren oder Neues und Interessantes mit ihr zu teilen (z. B. Begus & Southgate, 2012; Liszkowski, Carpenter, Henning, Striano & Tomasello, 2004). Aus diesen Annahmen ergeben sich verschiedene Vorhersagen in Bezug auf das gestische bzw. multimodale Verhalten junger Kinder in wiederholten Situationen, in denen einige Objekte bekannt und andere unbekannt sind. Um diese zu überprüfen, beobachteten wir 14 Kinder längsschnittlich zwischen ihrem 14. und 16. Lebensmonat alle zwei Wochen in einer semi-experimentellen Situation mit einer Bezugsperson und untersuchten, wie sich das sprachliche und gestische Verhalten in Abhängigkeit von der Familiarität mit Objekten verändert. Dabei wurden die Kinder auf der Grundlage ihres Wortschatzes mit 21 Monaten in zwei Gruppen (größerer vs. geringerer Wortschatz) geteilt. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Kinder mit einem größeren Wortschatz mehr Zeigegeste-Wort-Kombinationen gegenüber nicht bekannten Objekten als gegenüber bekannten und mehr Wörter insgesamt äußern, während sich für die Kinder mit einem geringeren Wortschatz keine Unterschiede in Bezug auf die Familiarität zeigten. Wir diskutieren die Ergebnisse im Sinne einer sozial-pragmatischen Nutzung der Zeigegeste.
Abstract. There is ongoing discussion on the function of the early production of gestures with regard to whether they reduce children's cognitive demands and free their capacity to perform other tasks (e. g., Goldin-Meadow & Wagner, 2005) or whether young children point in order to share their interest or to elicit information from their caregivers (e. g., Begus & Southgate, 2012; Liszkowski, Carpenter, Henning, Striano & Tomasello, 2004). The different assumptions lead to diverse predictions regarding infants' gestural or multimodal behavior in recurring situations, in which some objects are familiar and others are unfamiliar. To examine these different predictions, we observed 14 children aged between 14 and 16 months biweekly in a semi-experimental situation with a caregiver and explored how children's verbal and gestural behaviors change as a function of their familiarization with objects. We split the children into two groups based on their reported vocabulary size at 21 months of age (larger vs. smaller vocabulary). We found that children with a larger vocabulary at 21 months had an increase in their pointing with words toward unfamiliar objects as well as in their total amount of words, whereas for children with smaller vocabularies we did not find differences in relation to their familiarization with objects. We discuss these findings in terms of a social-pragmatic use of pointing gestures.
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