Development of sensitivity to beat gesture and contrastive accenting in support of word learning in early childhood in boys and girls

This research investigated whether observing beat gesture and hearing contrastive accenting with novel words enhances their learning in early childhood and whether these effects differ by sex in light of sex differences in the pace of language development. Fifty-three 3- to 5-year-old boys and girls learned pairs of novel words with contrasting referents with beat gesture, contrastive accenting, both, or neither. Knowledge of these words was then tested via a referent identification task. Novel word learning did not differ by beat gesture or contrastive accenting, nor did use of these cues to support word learning differ by age. However, 3-year-old boys were better able to identify the referents of novel words learned with rather than without beat gesture, and boys’ ability to identify the referents of novel words learned without beat gesture improved from ages 3 to 5 years. By contrast, no such effects of beat gesture on novel word learning by age were observed for girls. These results suggest that, for 3-year-old boys, beat gesture may compensate for difficulty deducing contrast from speech alone, and that their reliance on beat gesture as a cue to contrast decreases as their ability to deduce contrast from speech improves during early childhood. Thus, beat gesture may serve as a visual cue to contrast that scaffolds young children’s learning of words with contrasting meanings by supplementing the use of cues to contrast conveyed via speech.