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AbstractThe recognition of iconic correspondence between signal and referent has been argued to bootstrap the acquisition and emergence of language. Here, we study the ontogeny, and to some extent the phylogeny, of the ability to spontaneously relate iconic signals, gestures, and/or vocalizations, to previous experience. Children at 18, 24, and 36 months of age (N = 216) and great apes (N = 13) interacted with two apparatuses, each comprising a distinct action and sound. Subsequently, an experimenter mimicked either the action, the sound, or both in combination to refer to one of the apparatuses. Experiments 1 and 2 found no spontaneous comprehension in great apes and in 18‐month‐old children. At 24 months of age, children were successful with a composite vocalization‐gesture signal but not with either vocalization or gesture alone. At 36 months, children succeeded both with a composite vocalization‐gesture signal and with gesture alone, but not with vocalization alone. In general, gestures were understood better compared to vocalizations. Experiment 4 showed that gestures were understood irrespective of how children learned about the corresponding action (through observation or self‐experience). This pattern of results demonstrates that iconic signals can be a powerful way to establish reference in the absence of language, but they are not trivial for children to comprehend and not all iconic signals are created equal.

This research was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC Grant 609819 (SOMICS). Manuel Bohn was supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 749229. ; Great apes are able to request objects from humans by pointing. It is unclear, however, whether this is an associated response to a certain set of cues (e.g. the presence and attention of a human addressee) or a communicative signal which can be adjusted to relevant aspects of the spatial and social context. In three experiments, we tested captive great apes' flexible use of pointing gestures. We manipulated the communicative context so that the default pointing response of apes would have indicated an undesired object, either due to 1) the spatial arrangements of the target objects, 2) the perspective of the addressee or 3) the knowledge of the addressee about the target objects' location. The results of the three experiments indicate that great apes can successfully adjust their pointing to the spatial configuration of the referent environment such as distance and location of food. However, we found no evidence that they take the perspective or the knowledge of the addressee into account when doing so. This implies that pointing in great apes is a context-sensitive, but maybe less versatile, communicative signal compared to human pointing. ; Publisher PDF ; Peer reviewed

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy through EXC 2025/1 "Matters of Activity (MoA)" and by the "The Sound of Meaning (SOM)", Pu 97/22-1,"Brain Signatures of Communication (BraSiCo)", Pu 97/23-1, and "Phonological Networks (PhoNet)", Pu 97/25-1. K.M. was supported by the Berlin School of Mind and Brain and by the Onassis foundation. M.A was supported by the "SOMICS" ERC Synergy grant (nr.609819). M.B was supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 749229. ; Theories on the evolution of language highlight iconicity as one of the unique features of human language. One important manifestation of iconicity is sound symbolism, the intrinsic relationship between meaningless speech sounds and visual shapes, as exemplified by the famous correspondences between the pseudowords 'maluma' vs. 'takete' and abstract curved and angular shapes. Although sound symbolism has been studied extensively in humans including young children and infants, it has never been investigated in non-human primates lacking language. In the present study, we administered the classic "takete-maluma" paradigm in both humans (N = 24 and N = 31) and great apes (N = 8). In a forced choice matching task, humans but not great apes, showed crossmodal sound symbolic congruency effects, whereby effects were more pronounced for shape selections following round-sounding primes than following edgy-sounding primes. These results suggest that the ability to detect sound symbolic correspondences is the outcome of a phylogenetic process, whose underlying emerging mechanism may be relevant to symbolic ability more generally. ; Publisher PDF ; Peer reviewed

AbstractPragmatic abilities are fundamental to successful language use and learning. Individual differences studies contribute to understanding the psychological processes involved in pragmatic reasoning. Small sample sizes, insufficient measurement tools, and a lack of theoretical precision have hindered progress, however. Three studies addressed these challenges in three‐ to 5‐year‐old German‐speaking children (N = 228, 121 female). Studies 1 and 2 assessed the psychometric properties of six pragmatics tasks. Study 3 investigated relations among pragmatics tasks and between pragmatics and other cognitive abilities. The tasks were found to measure stable variation between individuals. Via a computational cognitive model, individual differences were traced back to a latent pragmatics construct. This presents the basis for understanding the relations between pragmatics and other cognitive abilities.Research Highlights
Individual differences in pragmatic abilities are important to understanding variation in language development.
Research in this domain lacks a precise theoretical framework and psychometrically high‐quality measures.
We present six tasks capturing a wide range of pragmatic abilities with excellent re‐test reliability.
We use a computational cognitive model to provide a substantive theory of individual differences in pragmatic abilities.

AbstractVariation in how frequently caregivers engage with their children is associated with variation in children's later language outcomes. One explanation for this link is that caregivers use both verbal behaviors, such as labels, and non‐verbal behaviors, such as gestures, to help children establish reference to objects or events in the world. However, few studies have directly explored whether language outcomes are more strongly associated with referential behaviors that are expressed verbally, such as labels, or non‐verbally, such as gestures, or whether both are equally predictive. Here, we observed caregivers from 42 Spanish‐speaking families in the US engage with their 18‐month‐old children during 5‐min lab‐based, play sessions. Children's language processing speed and vocabulary size were assessed when children were 25 months. Bayesian model comparisons assessed the extent to which the frequencies of caregivers' referential labels, referential gestures, or labels and gestures together, were more strongly associated with children's language outcomes than a model with caregiver total words, or overall talkativeness. The best‐fitting models showed that children who heard more referential labels at 18 months were faster in language processing and had larger vocabularies at 25 months. Models including gestures, or labels and gestures together, showed weaker fits to the data. Caregivers' total words predicted children's language processing speed, but predicted vocabulary size less well. These results suggest that the frequency with which caregivers of 18‐month‐old children use referential labels, more so than referential gestures, is a critical feature of caregiver verbal engagement that contributes to language processing development and vocabulary growth.Research Highlights
We examined the frequency of referential communicative behaviors, via labels and/or gestures, produced by caregivers during a 5‐min play interaction with their 18‐month‐old children.
We assessed predictive relations between labels, gestures, their combination, as well as total words spoken, and children's processing speed and vocabulary growth at 25 months.
Bayesian model comparisons showed that caregivers' referential labels at 18 months best predicted both 25‐month vocabulary measures, although total words also predicted later processing speed.
Frequent use of referential labels by caregivers, more so than referential gestures, is a critical feature of communicative behavior that supports children's later vocabulary learning.

AbstractIn conversation, individual utterances are almost always ambiguous, with this ambiguity resolved by context and discourse history (common ground). One important cue for disambiguation is the topic under discussion with a particular partner (e.g., "want to pick?" means something different in a conversation with a bluegrass musician vs. with a book club partner). Here, we investigated 2‐ to 5‐year‐old American English‐speaking children's (N = 131) reliance on conversational topics with specific partners to interpret ambiguous or novel words. In a tablet‐based game, children heard a speaker consistently refer to objects from a category without mentioning the category itself. In Study 1, 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds interpreted the ambiguous pronoun "it" as referring to another member of the same category. In Study 2, only 4‐year‐olds interpreted the pronoun as referring to the implied category when talking to the same speaker but not when talking to a new speaker. Thus, children's conception of what constitutes common ground in discourse develops substantially between ages 2 and 5.

Abstract
Pragmatics is foundational to language use and learning. Computational cognitive models have been successfully used to predict pragmatic phenomena in adults and children – on an aggregate level. It is unclear if they can be used to predict behavior on an individual level. We address this question in children (N = 60, 3- to 5-year-olds), taking advantage of recent work on pragmatic cue integration. In Part 1, we use data from four independent tasks to estimate child-specific sensitivity parameters to three information sources: semantic knowledge, expectations about speaker informativeness, and sensitivity to common ground. In Part 2, we use these parameters to generate participant-specific trial-by-trial predictions for a new task that jointly manipulated all three information sources. The model accurately predicted children's behavior in the majority of trials. This work advances a substantive theory of individual differences in which the primary locus of developmental variation is sensitivity to individual information sources.