ChildGesture · Neural Bases of Multimodal Integration in Children

Neural Bases of Multimodal Integration in Children

[What is the problem/issue being addressed?] Children typically learn their language in a multimodal environment as their caregivers interact with them with a variety of modalities such as eye gaze, facial expressions or hand gestures. Especially hand gestures are often used by caregivers to convey semantic information as well as speech. Thus, gestures are an important information medium for children to understand adult’s message. It is crucial to investigate how children process the information from gesture and speech in comprehension, and to what extent children can benefit from gesture when speech is ambiguous. [What are the overall objectives?] By using behavioural measures, many studies have revealed that children and adults can process information from iconic gestures and speech. However, behavioural measures are the off-line measure, which do not provide access to the underlying neurocognitive processing of speech and iconic gestures. Neurophysiological studies can provide more direct measures of the on-line cognitive process underlying the comprehension of co-occurring multimodal semantic information from speech and gesture. However, so far, neurophysiologic studies on speech-gesture integration have been restricted to adults. Thus, this project examined neurocognitive processing of semantic information from gesture and speech in children and adults by using both EEG and behaviour measures. 1. the online neurocognitive processing of gesture-speech integration in native Dutch-speaking 6-7-year-old children (Study 1). 2. to what extent gesture enhances speech comprehension of speech when speech is degraded. We examined this by using behaviour measures (Study 2) and EEG (Study3). [Why is it important for society?] It is important to conduct this research to obtain the neurobiological data on gesture-speech integration, because children receive multimodal input from their caregivers in their language acquisition. Two contributions are expected from this proposed project. On a theoretical level, the findings of the proposed study will provide the neurobiological mechanism in which gesture and speech are processes in children and adults. On a practical level, the findings will provide useful information to parents and teachers about how they should use their gestures to foster childrens’ language acquisition. This project will provide data providing the missing link between adults’ neurobiological data and childrens’ behaviour data on the process of multimodal integration. The result will impact not only on developmental psychology, but also on broad scientific fields such as neurobiology, informatics, robotics, cognitive science, and pedagogy.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз