GoThink – Really True? How Gestures Affect Logical Thinking in Children

Project Description

Recent studies on language acquisition show that iconic gestures boost vocabulary learning. However, little is known about how gestures support on-line abstract-logical thinking and the role of working memory in this process.

The aim of the project was to investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms of this interaction in an EEG experiment. The focus was on the processing of sentences containing the word some, which relates different quantities to each other. Such sentences have been reported to be processed differently by adults and children. For instance, the sentence Some elephants have trunks is logically true: If all elephants have trunks, some of them do as well. Nevertheless, adults often reject such sentences as false because they often interpret the word some as 'some but not all': Some elephants have trunks, but not all elephants have trunks. This interpretation is called implicature. At a specific phase of child development, children do not seem to draw such implicatures which was a starting point for the investigations.

We examined whether first and second grade students use gestural information to aid implicature processing and interpret these sentences in an improved way. The results of the project offer links for support in primary school that focuses on the learning of core mathematical skills such as set theory.

Project Objectives

The project explored which gestures children and adults use when uttering sentences with implicatures. Behavioural and EEG data provided initial findings on the influence of these gestures on logical-abstract thinking.

Funding

IDeA Center

Cooperations

• Goethe-Universiy Frankfurt: Dr. Petra Augurzky (joint direction of the project)
• Goethe-University Frankfurt: Prof. Dr. Cornelia Ebert
• DIPF: Prof. Dr. Garvin Brod

Publications

Augurzky, P., Franke, M., & Ulrich, R. (2019). Gricean expectations in online sentence comprehension: An ERP study on the processing of scalar inferences. Cognitive Science, 43(8):e12776. doi:10.1111/cogs.12776

Brod, G., Greve, A., Jolles, D., Theobald, M., & Galeano-Keiner, E. M. (2022). Explicitly predicting outcomes enhances learning of expectancy-violating information. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. doi:10.3758/s13423-022-02124-x

Ebert, Ch., Ebert, C., & Hörnig, R. (2018). Vocabulary learning improves with interactive finger gestures. In Rothkopf, C., Balfanz, D., Galuske, R., Jäkel, F., Kersting, K., Macke, J., & Mohler, B. (Eds.), KOGWIS 2018: Computational Approaches to Cognitive Science. Proceedings of the 14th Biannual Conference of the German Society for Cognitive Science. TU Darmstadt.

Galeano Weber, E. M., Dirk, J., & Schmiedek, F. (2018). Variability in the precision of children’s spatial working memory. Journal of Intelligence, 6(1), 8. doi:10.3390/jintelligence6010008

Project Management

Project Details