Facilitating communication across cultures
Child-directed speech is a context of interaction that involves using communication to teach new knowledge. Most studies of this involve very young children, which leaves much to be learned regarding communication with older children and adults. Furthermore, the studies deal mainly with speech, making them less complete. They omit strategies such as gestures, which people use when communicating. Another limitation is that a cross-cultural comparison is often times left out. In light of this, the EU-funded DEMONSTRATION DESIGN (Child directed demonstration across cultures) project is looking into the role of gesture in teaching older children and adults in two countries: Italy and the Netherlands. It is primarily looking at the age of the addressee and the culture of the speaker with 16 Dutch adults and 16 Italian adults. The participants were asked to play with two toys and then told to explain how they should be played with to an adult and then to a 10 year old. Results showed that Italians use more two-handed gestures for the child than for the adult, whereas the Dutch switched the orientation of the gestures for the child. People with no experience with children possess some know-how on designing demonstrations for them. Yet, every culture likely has its own means of using gestures as a teaching strategy. Potential impact is high in the fields of education and multimodal communication and for society overall. In socioeconomic terms, the results are useful for developing culture-specific teaching tools, which are useful in today's multicultural society.