One Beat to Guide Them – The Role of Beat Gestures in Early Language Development

From early infancy, infants use various cues, such as prosody and frequency, to learn language. In the present study we focused on a type of gesture that exhibits prosody alike features – beat gestures. Beat gestures are non-representational, rhythmic hand movements that are used to emphasize important elements within the flow of speech. Generally, they are synchronized with speech prosody, they do not contain any semantic meaning, and their use in developmental course begins later than other gesture types (including iconic and pointing gestures). We aimed to contribute to literature through the investigation of the role of beats by designing an online artificial language learning experiment. Firstly, we analyzed whether beats typically fall on functor (frequent) or content (non-frequent) words. In line with previous studies and our findings, we placed them on content words, using them as cues that potentially might help infants to extract the linguistic rules of this new language. The study included two conditions: aligned and misaligned. In the former, a digitally developed avatar was verbalizing the artificial language simultaneously performing the beat gestures that were placed on the content words (mimicking natural speech). In the later control condition instead, the gestures were distributed randomly on functor and content words. The videos of the digital avatar were shown to babies from 6 to 14 months old in an online format and their looking times were collected. The findings of the experiment aim to provide important insights in fields such as developmental cognitive neuroscience, linguistics, and psychology.