Angela Grimminger

An Interactive View on the Development of Deictic Pointing in Infancy

In this review, we will focus on the development of deictic pointing gestures. We propose that they are based on infants’ sensitivities to human motion. Since both conventionalized gestures and bodily movements can be interpreted as communicative, of special interest to us is how pointing gestures are employed within early social interactions. We push forward the idea of a conventionalization process taking place when the interaction partners guide infants’ participation toward joint goals. On their way to deploy pointing gestures and thus to successfully influence the partner for a specific purpose, infants need also to disengage from their own object perception or manipulation. In addition, infants accompany their gestures increasingly with verbal utterances—this form of communication is multimodal and offers the possibility to combine modalities for the purpose of expressing more complex utterances. The multimodal behavior will be picked up by caregivers and extended into linguistically more complex forms. Because of this emerging relationship to language and its social use, gestural behavior in early infancy is a powerful predictor for later language development.

Can you teach me?: Children teaching new words to a robot in a book reading scenario.

In research on children’s language development, joint book reading is appreciated as being a situation beneficial for language learning. Motivated by this string of research, our aim was to explore whether the situation of joint book reading can be applied to a child–robot interaction. Before investigating whether and how this situation – when applied in child–robot interaction – can be used as a language learning scenario, the interactional requirements for a successful dialogue have to be studied. Our main aim in this paper is to present a study design for a child–robot interaction, in which a robot is introduced as a learner that acquires new color words, and the child is asked to teach the robot those words within a familiar interaction format of joint book reading. We then report the observations that we made in a single-case pilot study conducted with a 4;8year-old child, and discuss these observations in terms of how the robot’s interactional behavior needs to be shaped to successfully participate in the situation of joint book reading.

Originalarbeit: Diagnostik des vorsprachlichen Kommunikationsverhaltens. Pilotstudie zur Konstruktvalidität eines neuen Elternfragebogens (Komm!-Bogen)

Der Komm!-Bogen erfasst die Qualitat des intentionalen Kommunikationsverhaltens bei minimal verbalen Kindern uber eine strukturierte Befragung der Eltern. Es werden hier die Ergebnisse einer langsschnittlichen Piloterprobung des Bogens bei 22 typisch entwickelten Kindern im Alter von 12, 16, 20 und 24 Monaten prasentiert. Der Bogen erweist sich dabei als geeignet, um interindividuelle Unterschiede in der Qualitat des Kommunikationsverhaltens differenziert abzubilden. Ferner kann gezeigt werden, dass sich die aus der Fachliteratur bekannten Befunde zur Kommunikationsentwicklung typisch entwickelter Kinder im zweiten Lebensjahr mit dem Komm!-Bogen replizieren lassen. Diese Ubereinstimmung wird als Hinweis auf eine gute Konstruktvaliditat des Bogens interpretiert.