心理语言学线上论坛 | 2022年3月23日16:00 Suzanne Aussems 博士讲座

Speaker: Suzanne Aussems

Title: What do iconic gestures and practical actions communicate to children?

Time: 16:00 – 17:30, 23 March 2022 

           (Beijing, Hong Kong time)

Venue: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/779556638

            https://cuhk.zoom.cn/j/779556638

What do iconic gestures and practical actions communicate to children?

Suzanne Aussems

University of Warwick

People naturally produce hand gestures while they speak. These spontaneous hand gestures often depict actions, motions, and shapes, to illustrate what is said. Gestures that resemble features of the referents of spoken words are called iconic gestures. Iconic gestures are empty hand movements produced in the air, while practical actions, in contrast, are manual actions performed on objects. In this presentation, I will explore what iconic gestures and practical actions communicate to children about the physical world. Through experiments on how seeing iconic gestures facilitates children’s event memory (Aussems & Kita, 2019) and word learning (Aussems & Kita, 2021), I will show that iconic gestures do more than just communicate information about the referents of spoken words. First, iconic gestures can direct children’s attention to an important part of a scene. Second, iconic gestures can help children gain the general (abstract) knowledge that verbs tend to refer to actions. Finally, I will also present a study which shows that practical action demonstrations can have similar effects on noun learning in infants (Zuniga-Montanez et al., 2021). Thus, both iconic gestures and practical actions bring a range of beneficial effects to young children in learning situations.

References:

Aussems, S., & Kita, S. (2019). Seeing iconic gestures with action events facilitates children’s memory of these events. Child Development, 90(4), 1123–1137. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12988

Aussems, S., & Kita, S. (2021). Seeing iconic gesture promotes first- and second-order verb generalization in preschoolers. Child Development, 92(1), 124–141. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13392

Zuniga-Montanez, C., Kita, S., Aussems, S., & Krott, A. (2021). Beyond the shape of things: Infants can be taught to generalise nouns by function. Psychological Science, 32(7), 1073–1085. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797621993107

About the Speaker

Dr Suzanne Aussems has been an Assistant Professor in Psychology at the University of Warwick since July 2020. She obtained BA (2007-2010) and MA degrees (2010-2012) in Culture Studies from Tilburg University, as well as a joint MPhil degree in Language and Communication (2012-2014) from Tilburg University and Radboud University Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. She obtained a PhD degree in Psychology from the University of Warwick (2014-2017), in the United Kingdom. After completing her PhD, she held two postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Warwick (2017-2019) and worked as postdoctoral researcher in developmental psychology at Royal Holloway University of London (2019-2020).

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