Turkish- and English-speaking children display sensitivity to perceptual context in the referring expressions they produce in speech and gesture

Abstract

Speakers choose a particular expression based on many factors, including availability of the referent in the perceptual context. We examined whether, when expressing referents, monolingual English- and Turkish-speaking children: (1) are sensitive to perceptual context, (2) express this sensitivity in language-specific ways, and (3) use co-speech gestures to specify referents that are underspecified. We also explored the mechanisms underlying children's sensitivity to perceptual context. Children described short vignettes to an experimenter under two conditions: The characters in the vignettes were present in the perceptual context (perceptual context); the characters were absent (no perceptual context). Children routinely used nouns in the no perceptual context condition, but shifted to pronouns (English-speaking children) or omitted arguments (Turkish-speaking children) in the perceptual context condition. Turkish-speaking children used underspecified referents more frequently than English-speaking children in the perceptual context condition; however, they compensated for the difference by using gesture to specify the forms. Gesture thus gives children learning structurally different languages a way to achieve comparable levels of specification while at the same time adhering to the referential expressions dictated by their language.

Keywords:

• Language development
• Referring expressions
• Discourse
• Gesture

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the NIH RO1 00491 to Susan Goldin-Meadow and AslI Özyürek. We thank the participating families for sharing their child's language development with us: Stacy Steine, Zachary Mitchell, Carolyn Mylander, Sevil Demir, Eda Demir and Çağla KantarcIgil for help in collecting and transcribing the data; and Carolyn Mylander for administrative and technical assistance.

Notes

¹There are a few exceptions in English where subjects can be omitted; clauses that allow subject omission include imperatives, e.g., “Open this door.”, wanna questions, e.g., “Wanna eat this?”, implied first person declaratives in past tense, e.g., “Got it!”, progressive participles in responses to questions, e.g., “Brushing teeth”.

²In Turkish, since person and number information about the subject is marked on the verb (through agreement morphemes), the subject can be recovered even when it is omitted (Küntay & Slobin, 1999; Turan, 1995). Turkish-speaking children mark person and number information on the verb when they omit subjects beginning around 2 years of age (Küntay & Slobin, 1999). Turkish also allows omission of objects. Since objects are not identified via morphemes on the verb, their omission is governed by discourse-pragmatic factors (Gürcanlı et al., 2007).

³English-speaking children in the no perceptual context condition were significantly older than Turkish-speaking children, t(18)= 2.63, p<.05. As a result, in the subsequent analyses, age was included as a covariate.

⁴In English, gendered personal pronouns can also be used to refer to animals. Four vignettes included an animal and an object. Across the two conditions, English-speaking children used the pronoun it more frequently (53 times) than the gendered pronoun he (10 times) to refer to the animal in these vignettes. Thus, although a gendered personal pronoun can be used to refer to animals in English, the children in our study preferred to use the pronoun it.

⁵A proposition consists of a predicate and its arguments.

⁶A predicate is the portion of a clause that expresses something about the subject.

⁷Pointing gestures are also known as deictic gestures (e.g., McNeill, 1992, 2005).

⁸Iconic gestures are also known as characterising (Goldin-Meadow & Mylander, 1984) or representational (Gullberg, de Bot, & Volterra, 2008) gestures.

⁹We also explored whether children's referring expressions varied by semantic role. We found that English-speaking children used 43% of their nouns to express actors and 27% to express patients. Similarly, Turkish-speaking children used 56% of their nouns to express actors and 18% to express patients. The differences were not significant. Thus, the higher proportion of noun use by English-speaking children compared to Turkish-speaking children cannot be attributed to the semantic role of the nouns.

¹⁰In terms of overall number of gestures produced in the no perceptual context condition, English-speaking children produced on average 1.8 (SD=3.08) iconic gestures and Turkish-children produced 0.7 (SD=1.25) iconic gestures.

¹¹In terms of overall number of gestures produced in the perceptual context condition, English-speaking children produced 0.44 (SD=0.73) iconic gestures and 4.67 (SD=4.27) pointing gestures. Turkish-children produced 5.11 (SD=6.13) iconic gestures and 8.89 (SD=5.67) pointing gestures.

¹²Fifty-three percent of the pronouns accompanied by gesture were expressed as the demonstrative pronoun bu, 37% as the locative pronoun buraya, 8% as the locative pronoun şuraya, 1% as the demonstrative pronoun şu, and 1% as o, which can be used both as a personal and demonstrative pronoun.

¹³Turkish-speaking children (M=0.16, SD=0.10) and English-speaking children (M=0.11, SD=0.10) did not significantly differ from each other in the proportion of referring expressions conveyed as nouns accompanied by gesture, t(16)= 1.07, p=.30.

¹⁴Turkish-speaking children disambiguated 70% of their pronouns with pointing gestures and 30% with iconic gestures. They disambiguated 24% of their omitted arguments with pointing gestures and 76% with iconic gestures. English-speaking children disambiguated 86% of their pronouns with pointing gestures and 24% with iconic gestures. They disambiguated 6% of their omitted arguments with pointing gestures and 94% with iconic gestures.