Gesture as a cue to distinguish generic vs. particular reference: Parental production and child comprehension

Inductive reasoning is fundamental to the ways in which we understand categories. One step in this form of reasoning is the determination of whether a property applies category-wide or is relevant only to particular instances. Linguistic devices known as generic noun phrases (e.g., Birds lay eggs) license broad generalization of properties across categories more so than do particular noun phrases (e.g., That bird is laying an egg). Pragmatic, socio-pragmatic, and world knowledge-based information work in concert with language to signal type of reference, and ample research has demonstrated that children are sensitive to these sources of information. This dissertation provides evidence regarding how one specific source of socio-pragmatic information, namely gesture, also plays a role in disambiguating between generic and particular.;Study 1 demonstrated that in naturalistic interaction, mothers of 3- and 4-year-old children provided more points when predicating properties of particular referents relative to generic referents. Studies 2 and 3 addressed how children recruited socio-pragmatic skills to use this gestural information, asking whether children could integrate gesture with linguistically provided properties to infer generic vs. particular reference. Specifically, these studies assessed whether children recognized points as a unique cue to generic or particular status when linguistic cues were ambiguous with respect to this distinction (e.g., They are afraid of raccoons said in the presence of a picture of three dogs, where they could refer to dogs as a kind or a particular subset). Findings suggested that providing a property while pointing to a particular subset (e.g., two of three dogs) did not impact children's interpretations of generic vs. particular reference; children typically reported that the property was relevant to the category as opposed to particular individuals (e.g., Dogs are afraid of raccoons vs. Those dogs are afraid of raccoons). However, findings also suggested that children expected points to be particular-referring in a different pragmatic context, namely when a speaker predicated two properties while directing points to two unique subsets. In sum, the results of the current studies provide compelling evidence for the role of children's flexible socio-pragmatic understanding of gesture as it functions to distinguish generic from particular.