Esteve‐Gibert , N., Prieto, P., & Liszkowski , U. (2017)

1. Esteve‐Gibert, N., Prieto, P., & Liszkowski, U. (2017) Twelve‐Month‐Olds Understand Social Intentions Based on Prosody and Gesture Shape

2. “…from a developmental point of view, the challenge has been to show that infants communicate meaningfully before they engage in verbal communication and explicit theory-of-mind reasoning. From a cognitive point of view, the question is: How do infants do this?” Infants aren’t really competent communicators 1. Human communication uses sophisticated metapsychology 2. Infants are “genuine” communicators by 9-12 months Infants can use sophisticated metapsychology Infants don’t use sophisticated metapsychology but are still genuine communicators

3. How are infants’ social/pragmatic inferences kept simple? Can infants understand social intentions through prosody and gesture shape when the action context is kept consistent?

4. Twelve-Month-Olds Understand Social Intentions Based on Prosody and Gesture Shape (Esteve-Gibert et al., 2017) Experiment 1: • Response coding: • 3 groups: Expressive (declarative), Imperative, Interrogative • Attending cup: “when the infant looked at the cup ostensively, pointed at it, or picked it up and played with it” • Parents performed the gesture and prosodic pattern (lexical content not controlled) • Offering cup:“when the infant took the cup from the stick and gave it to the caregiver” • Attending sticker: “when the infant took the cup off the stick and looked at, pointed at or played ostensively with the sticker or the black stick under the cup”

5. Twelve-Month-Olds Understand Social Intentions Based on Prosody and Gesture Shape (Esteve-Gibert et al., 2017) Results:

6. Twelve-Month-Olds Understand Social Intentions Based on Prosody and Gesture Shape (Esteve-Gibert et al., 2017) Experiment 2: • Similar set-up but with a trained experimenter • Prosody and gesture shape kept consistent • Lexical content controlled Expressive condition: E produced an index-finger pointing gesture and used a wide pitch range and long syllables. • Imperative condition: E produced a palm-up whole-hand pointing gesture, palm tilted slightly upwards, and used a wide pitch range and short syllables. Informative condition: E produced an index-finger pointing gesture and used a narrow pitch range and short syllables

7. Twelve-Month-Olds Understand Social Intentions Based on Prosody and Gesture Shape (Esteve-Gibert et al., 2017) Results:

8. Conclusions Their story for how prosody and gesture are useful for interpreting social/pragmatic intentions: “This additional information source derives from the quotidian concurrent characteristics of communicative acts, such as prosody and gesture shape, through which social intentions are expressed… …Infants likely first learn about act accompanying characteristics because they repeatedly co-occur with acts that are embedded in extensively shared, meaningful action contexts, like rituals and routines.” Question 1: Does this fully explain why prosody and gesture shape simplify infants’ social/pragmatic inferences?

9. Conclusions “In the absence of pre-established common ground and lexical information, it is presumably easiest and most natural for infants to interpret a pointing gesture as an expression of affective interest, because this motive is rooted in communicative (nonreferential) exchanges that develop soon after birth.” Question 2: How does the motive to share affect and attention in dyadic interaction start to express itself in triadic/referential contexts? Question 2a: At what point in development are the salient shared meaningful action contexts?

10. Minimising the difficulty of social/pragmatic inferences • (Some) gestures • Shared action contexts • Prosody • Emotion • Intentions-in-action • Ostensive signals

11. Minimising the difficulty of social/pragmatic inferences • The problem: the gap between the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of any given behaviour (Jacobs & Jeannerod 2005) • A problem for interpreting both communicative and non-communicative behaviour • Why is he pointing there? (communicative) • Why is she walking that direction? (non-communicative) • When is this less difficult and why? (When is the gap not so big?)

12. Minimising the difficulty of social/pragmatic inferences: Iconic associations • Prosody: vocal expressions are interpreted according to biologically grounded, iconic properties (Bolinger, 1986; Gussenhoven, 2002) • ‘Biological codes’ project physical properties which explain universal prosodic features • These provide universal prosodic effects for emotional prosody and consistent informational effects • E.g. Pitch frequency --> size --> certainty/uncertainty --> questioning/asserting Pitch range --> effort --> surprise/helpfulness --> requesting help

13. Minimising the difficulty of social/pragmatic inferences: Iconic associations • Emotion: provides, in some sense, a direct route to internal states (Reddy, 2008; Bar-On, 2013; Xu et al, 2013) • Evolutionarily speaking, emotions serve to produce physiological changes that provide advantages individually and expressively • The physiological changes provide changes in appearance and behaviour interpretable through 1) innate understanding and/or 2) very early experience • Could even say that emotional states are co-constituted by external behaviour and the internal state, ensuring a tiny (or non-existent) what-why gap

14. Minimising the difficulty of social/pragmatic inferences: Iconic associations • Gestures: have iconic properties that simplify interpretation of intent • Pointing lends itself to directing attention? • Pointing is iconically linked to reaching? • Extended index finger versus open palm: iconically linked to social intentions?

15. Minimising the difficulty of social/pragmatic inferences: Iconic associations • Intentions-in-action: an intention which is in the course of being executed • We have a sense of others’ movements as intentional which we attribute immediately and non-reflectively • The immediate reading of the behaviour seems to be tied up with a particular internal intentional state, even if this subsequently can be reanalysed • E.g. 4-month-old infants interpret a mother reaching towards them as intentional and adjust their posture (Reddy et al., 2013)

16. Minimising the difficulty of social/pragmatic inferences: Iconic associations • It is important to note: • Not all mental states are the same types of thing • But it seems reasonable to say that they, in some way, all contribute to intentions/communicative intentions/referential targets- but how? • How do we tell whether behaviours are understood through their iconic properties versus through ritualisation in simple action contexts?

17. Minimising the difficulty of social/pragmatic inferences • Suggestions: • Issues: • How does these factors get infants any closer to identifying communicative intentions? • The infant’s social world involves emotionally charged expressions and intentionally transparent actions/movements • How do we differentiate between comprehension in terms of iconic properties of actions versus in terms of ritualised actions? • These behaviours provide a special kind of direct access to minds and facilitate social/pragmatic inferences • Infants are capable of interpreting these expressions innately and/or through experience gained through early dyadic interactions

18. Minimising the difficulty of social/pragmatic inferences: Shared action contexts, default social motivations

19. Minimising the difficulty of social/pragmatic inferences: Shared action contexts, default social motivations “In the absence of pre-established common ground and lexical information, it is presumably easiest and most natural for infants to interpret a pointing gesture as an expression of affective interest, because this motive is rooted in communicative (nonreferential) exchanges that develop soon after birth”

20. Minimising the difficulty of social/pragmatic inferences: Shared action contexts, default social motivations “In the absence of pre-established common ground and lexical information, it is presumably easiest and most natural for infants to interpret a pointing gesture as an expression of affective interest, because this motive is rooted in communicative (nonreferential) exchanges that develop soon after birth” How is this motive expressed in referential situations? (i.e. What happens (motivationally) from dyadic to triadic engagement?)

21. Minimising the difficulty of social/pragmatic inferences: Shared action contexts, default social motivations “In the absence of pre-established common ground and lexical information, it is presumably easiest and most natural for infants to interpret a pointing gesture as an expression of affective interest, because this motive is rooted in communicative (nonreferential) exchanges that develop soon after birth” How is this motive expressed in referential situations? (i.e. What happens (motivationally) from dyadic to triadic engagement?) Fundamental motivation to share attention/affect Fundamental motivation to share attention/affect about something • The interaction of this basic motivation with newfound capabilities for joint attention? • A motivation to learn generalizable information (Csibra & Gergely, 2009)? • Something else entirely explains the pattern of results?

22. Minimising the difficulty of social/pragmatic inferences • Suggestions: • Issues: • The infant’s social world involves emotionally charged expressions and intentionally transparent actions/movements • How does these factors get infants any closer to identifying communicative intentions? • How do we differentiate between comprehension in terms of iconic properties of actions versus in terms of ritualised actions? • These behaviours provide a special kind of direct access to minds and facilitate social/pragmatic inferences • Infants are capable of interpreting these expressions innately and/or through experience gained through early dyadic interactions • How does the motivation to share attention/affect in general become a motivation to share attention/affect to things in the world? • Infants’ basic motivation to share attention and affect provides a generic strategy for interpreting referential acts. • Is there really such thing as a neutral action context? • Can infants communicate because their inferences are kept simple or because metarepresentation isn’t that hard? (or both)