Ulf Liszkowski

Twelve-Month-Olds' Comprehension and Production of Pointing.

This study explored whether infants aged 12 months already recognize the communicative function of pointing gestures. Infants participated in a task requiring them to comprehend an adults informative pointing gesture to the location of a hidden toy. They mostly succeeded in this task, which required them to infer that the adult was attempting to direct their attention to a location for a reason - because she wanted them to know that a toy was hidden there. Many of the infants also reversed roles and produced appropriate pointing gestures for the adult in this same game, and indeed there was a correlation such that comprehenders were for the most part producers. These findings indicate that by 12 months of age infants are beginning to show a bidirectional understanding of communicative pointing.

Three lines in the emergence of prelinguistic communication and social cognition

Sociocultural theories of development posit that higher cognitive functions emerge through socially mediated processes, in particular through language. However, theories of human communication posit that language itself is based on higher social cognitive skills and cooperative motivations. Prelinguistic communication is a test case to this puzzle. In the current review, I first present recent and new findings of a research program on prelinguistic infants’ communication skills. This research provides empirical evidence for a rich social cognitive and motivational basis of human communication before language. Next, I discuss the emergence of these foundational skills. By considering all three lines of development, and by drawing on new findings from phylogenetic and cross-cultural comparisons, this article discusses the possibility that the cognitive foundations of prelinguistic communication are, in turn, mediated by social interactional input and shared experiences.

15-Month-Old Infants Fast Map Words but Not Representational Gestures of Multimodal Labels

This study investigated whether 15-month-old infants fast map multimodal labels, and, when given the choice of two modalities, whether they preferentially fast map one better than the other. Sixty 15-month-old infants watched films where an actress repeatedly and ostensively labeled two novel objects using a spoken word along with a representational gesture. In the test phase, infants were assigned to one of three conditions: Word, Word + Gesture, or Gesture. The objects appeared in a shelf next to the experimenter and, depending on the condition, infants were prompted with either a word, a gesture, or a multimodal word–gesture combination. Using an infant eye tracker, we determined whether infants made the correct mappings. Results revealed that only infants in the Word condition had learned the novel object labels. When the representational gesture was presented alone or when the verbal label was accompanied by a representational gesture, infants did not succeed in making the correct mappings. Results reveal that 15-month-old infants do not benefit from multimodal labeling and that they prefer words over representational gestures as object labels in multimodal utterances. Findings put into question the role of multimodal labeling in early language development.

Infants' expectations about gestures and actions in third-party interactions.

We investigated 14-month-old infants’ expectations toward a third party addressee of communicative gestures and an instrumental action. Infants’ eye movements were tracked as they observed a person (the Gesturer) point, direct a palm-up request gesture, or reach toward an object, and another person (the Addressee) respond by grasping it. Infants’ looking patterns indicate that when the Gesturer pointed or used the palm-up request, infants anticipated that the Addressee would give the object to the Gesturer, suggesting that they ascribed a motive of request to the gestures. In contrast, when the Gesturer reached for the object, and in a control condition where no action took place, the infants did not anticipate the Addressee’s response. The results demonstrate that infants’ recognition of communicative gestures extends to others’ interactions, and that infants can anticipate how third-party addressees will respond to others’ gestures.

Cultural learning and cultural creation

U. Muller, J. Carpendale, N. Budwig, B. Sokol, Developmental Relations Between Forms of Social Interaction and Forms of Thought: An Introduction. M. Bickhard, Are You Social? The Ontological and Developmental Emergence of the Person. J. Martin, Perspectives and Persons: Ontological, Constitutive Possibilities. T. Behne, M. Carpenter, M. Grafenhain, K. Liebal, U. Liszkowski, H. Moll, H.Rakoczy, M. Tomasello, F. Warneken, E. Wyman, Cultural Learning and Cultural Creation. P. Hobson, J. Meyer, In the Beginning is Relation and Then What? V. Reddy, Experiencing the Social. M. B. Bibok, J.I.M. Carpendale, C. Lewis, Social Knowledge as Social Skill: An Action Based View of Social Understanding. J. Dunn, Relationships and Childrens Discovery of Mind. G. Duveen, C. Psaltis, The Constructive Role of Asymmetry in Social Interaction. M. Bamberg, Selves and Identities in the Making: The Study of Microgenetic Processes in Interactive Practices. C. R. Hallpike, The Anthropology of Moral Development. E. Turiel, Individuals and Social Change.

Two sources of meaning in infant communication: Preceding action contexts and act-accompanying characteristics

How do infants communicate before they have acquired a language? This paper supports the hypothesis that infants possess social–cognitive skills that run deeper than language alone, enabling them to understand others and make themselves understood. I suggested that infants, like adults, use two sources of extralinguistic information to communicate meaningfully and react to and express communicative intentions appropriately. In support, a review of relevant experiments demonstrates, first, that infants use information from preceding shared activities to tailor their comprehension and production of communication. Second, a series of novel findings from our laboratory shows that in the absence of distinguishing information from preceding routines or activities, infants use accompanying characteristics (such as prosody and posture) that mark communicative intentions to extract and transmit meaning. Findings reveal that before infants begin to speak they communicate in meaningful ways by binding preceding and simultaneous multisensory information to a communicative act. These skills are not only a precursor to language, but also an outcome of social–cognitive development and social experience in the first year of life.

The Social Reach: 8-Month-Olds Reach for Unobtainable Objects in the Presence of Another Person

Linguistic communication builds on prelinguistic communicative gestures, but the ontogenetic origins and complexities of these prelinguistic gestures are not well known. The current study tested whether 8-month-olds, who do not yet point communicatively, use instrumental actions for communicative purposes. In two experiments, infants reached for objects when another person was present and when no one else was present; the distance to the objects was varied. When alone, the infants reached for objects within their action boundaries and refrained from reaching for objects out of their action boundaries; thus, they knew about their individual action efficiency. However, when a parent (Experiment 1) or a less familiar person (Experiment 2) sat next to them, the infants selectively increased their reaching for out-of-reach objects. The findings reveal that before they communicate explicitly through pointing gestures, infants use instrumental actions with the apparent expectation that a partner will adopt and complete their goals.

A gestural repertoire of 1- to 2-year-old human children: in search of the ape gestures

When we compare human gestures to those of other apes, it looks at first like there is nothing much to compare at all. In adult humans, gestures are thought to be a window into the thought processes accompanying language, and sign languages are equal to spoken language with all of its features. Some research firmly emphasises the differences between human gestures and those of other apes; however, the question about whether there are any commonalities is rarely investigated, and has mostly been confined to pointing gestures. The gestural repertoires of nonhuman ape species have been carefully studied and described with regard to their form and function—but similar approaches are much rarer in the study of human gestures. This paper applies the methodology commonly used in the study of nonhuman ape gestures to the gestural communication of human children in their second year of life. We recorded (n = 13) children’s gestures in a natural setting with peers and caregivers in Germany and Uganda. Children employed 52 distinct gestures, 46 (89%) of which are present in the chimpanzee repertoire. Like chimpanzees, they used them both singly, and in sequences, and employed individual gestures flexibly towards different goals.

Multimodal multiperson interaction with infants aged 9 to 15 months

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