Final Report Summary - DEMONSTRATION DESIGN (Child directed demonstration across cultures)
Human beings are the only species that use communication in order to teach new knowledge to other members of their community. This context of interaction often involves children and this requires a specific register, which has been mostly studied under the rubric of “Child-Directed Speech” or “Motherese”. Unfortunately, the majority of the studies about Child-directed communication concerns very young children, so we know very little about communication with older children and in comparison with adults. Furthermore, usually these studies deal only with speech. However, in order to be effective, the adult has to employ a combination of strategies involving not only speech but also co-speech gesture, which is the flow of movements of the hands and of the arm that we perform while we speak. Finally, the few studies concerning the role of gesture in Child-directed communication do not include any cross-cultural comparison, with the risk of considering universal results coming from studies carried out only with American English participants. Therefore, the goal of the project is to investigate the role of gesture in teaching to older children and to other adults in two different cultures, i.e. The Netherlands and Italy. In details, it proposes to investigate how demonstrations of new objects, with the speech they accompany, are sensitive to 1) the age of the addressee 2) the culture of the speaker.
We asked 16 Dutch adults and 16 Italian adults (undergraduate and graduate students) to play with two toys (the “Tower of Hanoi” and “Camelot”, some wooden blocks to arrange in a path with some constraints) and then to explain how they should be played with, first to another adult and then to a ten years-old child (or vice versa) in a within-subject design.
We found, first of all, a significant increase in the number of content words for the child in both cultures. Concerning gesture, we found that Italians produced more iconic (gesture that depict the referent) gestures per word than Dutch. Concerning the adult-child comparison, we found different results in the two cultures. Italians used more two-hand gestures for the child than for the adult. Dutch switched the orientation of the gestural depiction for the child, using more the child’s perspective than in the adult condition. Both cultures, finally, used less hand shapes in the description for the child than for the adult, suggesting a simplification and an increase of consistency in the depicting strategies for the child.
This project has a high impact both for research in the field of education and multimodal communication, and for the society in general. Concerning the impact on the state of art of the research, these results show that people with no experience with children have some implicit knowledge about how to design demonstrations for ten years-old children and this affect both speech and co-speech gestures. However, this implicit knowledge leads to different strategies in different cultures, suggesting that every culture may have its own way to use gesture as a teaching strategy. Further research with the same methodology will show if the results can be extended to other cultures and to different age groups.
Concerning the socio-economic impact, the results of the study can be applied for developing cultural-specific teaching tools which take into account the gestural medium together with the speech. Nowadays, Europe is facing the challenge of dealing with multi-cultural societies, with a lot of immigration not only from other continents, but specially within-Europe. Immigrants's, in particular, have the hard task to learn not only a new language, but also the traditions and the cultural world of the new country. The teachers could be trained and become aware that 1) gesture is an important component of the teaching strategies and 2) there are cultural differences in talking and gesturing to children. This could be a powerful instrument in order to reduce the difficulties in communication and, ultimately, could reduce the material, cognitive and emotional costs of integration, increasing dialogue among cultures.
We asked 16 Dutch adults and 16 Italian adults (undergraduate and graduate students) to play with two toys (the “Tower of Hanoi” and “Camelot”, some wooden blocks to arrange in a path with some constraints) and then to explain how they should be played with, first to another adult and then to a ten years-old child (or vice versa) in a within-subject design.
We found, first of all, a significant increase in the number of content words for the child in both cultures. Concerning gesture, we found that Italians produced more iconic (gesture that depict the referent) gestures per word than Dutch. Concerning the adult-child comparison, we found different results in the two cultures. Italians used more two-hand gestures for the child than for the adult. Dutch switched the orientation of the gestural depiction for the child, using more the child’s perspective than in the adult condition. Both cultures, finally, used less hand shapes in the description for the child than for the adult, suggesting a simplification and an increase of consistency in the depicting strategies for the child.
This project has a high impact both for research in the field of education and multimodal communication, and for the society in general. Concerning the impact on the state of art of the research, these results show that people with no experience with children have some implicit knowledge about how to design demonstrations for ten years-old children and this affect both speech and co-speech gestures. However, this implicit knowledge leads to different strategies in different cultures, suggesting that every culture may have its own way to use gesture as a teaching strategy. Further research with the same methodology will show if the results can be extended to other cultures and to different age groups.
Concerning the socio-economic impact, the results of the study can be applied for developing cultural-specific teaching tools which take into account the gestural medium together with the speech. Nowadays, Europe is facing the challenge of dealing with multi-cultural societies, with a lot of immigration not only from other continents, but specially within-Europe. Immigrants's, in particular, have the hard task to learn not only a new language, but also the traditions and the cultural world of the new country. The teachers could be trained and become aware that 1) gesture is an important component of the teaching strategies and 2) there are cultural differences in talking and gesturing to children. This could be a powerful instrument in order to reduce the difficulties in communication and, ultimately, could reduce the material, cognitive and emotional costs of integration, increasing dialogue among cultures.