Learning speech-internal cues to pronoun interpretation from co-speech gesture: a training study.

This study explores whether children can learn a structural processing bias relevant to pronoun interpretation from brief training. Over three days, 42 five-year-olds were exposed to narratives exhibiting a first-mentioned tendency. Two characters were introduced, and the first-mentioned was later described engaging in a solo activity.

Children's use of gesture in ambiguous pronoun interpretation.

This study explores whether children can use gesture to inform their interpretation of ambiguous pronouns. Specifically, we ask whether four- to eight-year-old English-speaking children are sensitive to information contained in co-referential localizing gestures in video narrations. The data show that the older (7-8 years of age) but not younger (4-5 years) children integrate co-referential gestures into their interpretation of pronouns.

The problem of conventionality in the development of creole morphological systems.

This paper focuses on the problem of the conventionalization of grammatical morphology during language formation, asking how a form comes to have a shared grammatical meaning in an emerging linguistic community. Results from an experiment, inspired by changes in the use of space in Nicaraguan Sign Language, are presented that demonstrate the difficulty of conventionalization for grammatical forms. We show that even in cases where meaning should be relatively easy to discern, adult listeners are not consistent, either internally or when compared to each other, in the inferences they draw.