Kazuki Sekine
3.2 Mean scores of speech and gestural measures in route and survey group Table 3 shows the average age, mean amount of total speaking time (time spent on the
route or survey description), total number of morphemes (excluding fillers such as ‘uh’,
‘ah’, hesitations, and speech errors), number of landmarks, such as a park, river, or Table 2. Number of children in survey and route group
Survey group Route group
Boys Girls Total Boys Girls Total
6 years 3 1 4 29 17 46
5 years 2 1 3 16 17 33
4 years 0 0 0 14 22 36
Kazuki Sekine
Table 3. Average age, speech, and gestural performance (SD)
Survey group (N = 7) Route group (N = 79) T value
Average age (month) 70.1 (9.6) 72.1 (7.1) 0.66
Total speaking time (second) 40.2 (27.5) 37.8 (31.6) 0.2
Total number of morphemes 59.1 (46.9) 50.5 (38.7) 0.55
Number of landmarks 1.7 (1.1) 3.1 (3.2) 1.12
Number of left/right terms 0.1 (0.4) 1.1 (2) 3.72***
Total number of gestures 17.7 (6.6) 10.8 (8.9) 2.01*
Frequency of gestures (per second) 0.5 (0.2) 0.3 (0.2) 2.54**
*** p<.001 ** p<.01 * p<.05
hospital (with the exception of the nursery school and child’s own home), number of left/right terms, total number of gestures and frequency of gestures per second for both groups. A t-test, comparing the mean scores of these indices, revealed that the route group produced significantly more left/right terms than the survey group (t = (84) 3.72, p < . 001) and that the total number and frequency of gestures in the survey group were significantly greater than those in the route group (t = (84) 2.54, p < .001, t = (84) 2.07, p < .001, respectively). These results suggest that the children in the survey group tend to depend on gestures to describe their route. Perhaps they rely on gestures to indicate directions because they are lacking left/right terms.
3.3 Describing the starting point in the route group
To better understand how children in both groups describe their route, it is important to look at how speech and gesture interact in more detail. Let us examine the following examples by focusing on the starting point of their routes.
Most children in the route group started their descriptions with the direction of movement or the motion taken immediately after leaving the gate, without explicitly depicting the gate or location of the nursery school in gesture and/or speech. This might be due to the setting in which the route description was collected, where the location of the gate was shared between the child and the experimenter. Figure 1 shows a typical explanation of the starting point in the route group.
Child A, as shown in Figure 1, starts describing her route using the motion verb deru ‘to get out’. Her utterance implies that the gate is the origin of the motion, but neither the gate itself nor its location is mentioned verbally. The gate is orthogonal to the slope, which inclines to the left. Based on the angle of her gesture and the accom-panying speech in Figure 1, it appears that she transposes an origo to the right outside the gate, and indicates the direction of the bottom of the slope from there. Child B ((a) in Figure 2) illustrates a second means used by the route group to express the starting point. He indicates the direction of the gate by pointing from the room to the actual
Chapter 13. The development of spatial perspective
(a) orite kou (go down the slope do like this)
de-te: [[si*] [sakao o(a)ri-te] [kou yat-te] [massugu it-te] soide get.out-and si* slope acc go.down-and like.this do-and straight go-and then
“(I/you) get out, go down the slope, and go straight like this and then”
Figure 1. A description of the starting point in the route group (girl A, 5 years old).
(a) [[kou it-te][ kou it-te] [saka o ori-te this.way go-andthis.waygo-and slopeaccgo.down-and
“(I/you) go this way, go this way, and go down the slope, and”
(a) kou itte kou itte (go like this, go like this)
Figure 2. A description of the starting point in the route group (boy B, 4 years old).
environment, that is, without transposing an origo. This child begins by saying ‘doing like this and doing like this’ while pointing in the actual direction. Like child A, he does not mention the gate or the nursery school itself.
Thus, children in the route group tend to start their explanations with the move-ment they will take right after they leave the gate, without move-mentioning starting points in the route. Because describing motion from a route map perspective makes the location of the starting point obvious, children do not need to mention it explicitly. This is a way of explaining the starting point which is mainly seen in the route group. Common ges-ture characteristics of the route group are that (1) gesges-tures are produced in three-di-mensional space with depth and (2) the starting point is not assigned in gesture space.
Kazuki Sekine
3.4 Describing the starting point in the survey group
Let us observe a description of a starting point in the survey group (Figure 3). Child C ((b) in Figure 3) sets up his nursery school as a starting point in the gesture space by pointing to the ground while using a demonstrative koko ‘here’. Interestingly, most children in the survey group, like child C, used words such as omou ‘to suppose’ to make their listener understand that that particular point in their frontal space signified the location of the nursery school. This suggests that children in the survey group notice that their listener has a different perspective from theirs and that they know how to share their perspective with the listener. The fact that they use gesture and speech to make the listener assume a particular point in gesture space as a specific landmark on their route implies that they are aware of the need to make their listener understand what the gesture or the gesture space stand for in order to share perspec-tive with their listener.
(a) anone (well) (b) koko ga (here is)
(c) matigaeta (made mistake)
[[(a)anone ii (b)koko ga hoikuen to omotte yo]
inj inj here nom nursery.school quot suppose.imp fp
“Well, (are you) ready? Suppose that here is the nursery school.”
[hoikuen to omotte yo site: koko kara de-te ] nursery.school quot suppose.imp fp and here from go.out-and
“Suppose as the nursery school and, (I/you) go out from here,”
[(c)matigae ta]
make.mistake pst “I made (a) mistake.”
[koko kara][ hoikuen o de-te sorekara] [maga* koko kara to ato here from nursery.school acc go.out-and then turn* here from and then
“(I/you) go out the nursery school from here, and turn*, from here and then”
Figure 3. A description of a starting point in the survey group (boy C, 6 years old).
Chapter 13. The development of spatial perspective
In the survey group, other expressive behaviors showing a deliberate use of the gesture space were observed. For example, child C tried to point in the actual direction of the gate as he used the discourse marker ‘well, are you ready?’ at the beginning of the route description ((a) in Figure 3). But, before he finished indicating the external environ-ment he moved to the depiction of the gate in his gesture space. This stagnation of a gesture might reflect the speaker’s hesitation to choose a perspective and implies that the speaker has multiple descriptive strategies or mental models of the large-scale en-vironment. In addition, it was observed that child C erased a part of the route that had been already depicted by wiping the floor ((c) in Figure 3). This erasing gesture was never observed in the route group. Child C seems to be conscious that the listener might make use of his gestures depicting the route on the floor as an important infor-mational source.
These observations suggest that children in the survey group can symbolically as-sign a starting point or landmarks in a two-dimension plane of the gesture space and that they try to share it with their listeners who can simultaneously overview the route that the speaker depicts. An implication is that some children in the survey group purposefully choose the survey perspective to describe the route using multiple de-scriptive strategies. These are considered characteristics of the survey group.
4. Discussion
In this study I investigated the spatial perspective assumed by preschool children as reflected in gestures and speech produced in route descriptions. The study revealed that some children produce survey map gestures, and this implies that children can begin to take a survey perspective from late preschool age.
Comparing the characteristic descriptions of the survey group with those of the route group, I found that, although there is no difference in the average age of the groups, children in the survey group produced fewer left-right terms and a greater number and frequency of gestures than children in the route group. These results indi-cate that children in the survey group tend to describe the direction of movement mainly through gesture.
Studies of spatial cognition have suggested that survey map representations – which systematically coordinate landmarks in the environment from a single perspec-tive – are acquired around the middle grades of school-aged children (i.e., at 8 or 9 years old). The results of the present study suggest that an understanding of the en-vironment from a bird’s-eye viewpoint is available from as early as 5 years of age and that an initial form of survey map representations begins to appear by that period. In contrast to some children in the route group who point directly to their actual route (Sekine 2009), children in the survey group tend to set up the nursery school as the starting point in gesture space and make use of such space symbolically. The symbolic use of space would underlie the survey map representation.
Kazuki Sekine
Why are survey map gestures produced? Let us consider factors that influence the appearance of such gestures. First, we consider the lack of directional indicators, such as left-right terms. Children in the survey group most likely avoided left-right terms because of a difficulty indicating left-right with respect to their own bodies. Instead, they chose a strategy in which they depicted the route directly on the floor.
Second, children in the survey group might have a greater ability to adjust their route descriptions according to the listener’s knowledge of the route. Generally, when preschoolers describe their route, they express it either by pointing directly to the ac-tual environment or by depicting a view that they can see when they acac-tually walk in the environment (Sekine 2009). However, children in the survey group use the two-dimensional space which lies between themselves and their listener. Children in the survey group might have the ability to speculate that depicting the environment from a survey viewpoint would be a better means of communication for the listener, rather than depicting it from an egocentric perspective, because a description using survey map gestures makes the route visible and sharable between them.
A third factor concerns the characteristics of play the children prefer. I attended this nursery school once a week for six years as a volunteer to support the teacher, so I was familiar with the children who participated in the study, their teachers, and the return routes to their homes. Observing the play preferences of the children who par-ticipated in the study for several years, I found that, although this is an anecdote, all children in the survey group were more likely to play with toys such as mini cars or railway models, which induce children to take a bird’s eye viewpoint with respect to the miniature models. Play preferences in daily life might influence the way children express or understand their environment.
Considering these factors as influences on the production of survey map gestures, when children attain preschool age, they may start acquiring both a ‘spatial perspec-tive’ – taking a view which is spatially different from that taken in the here-and-now – and also a ‘social perspective’ – adjusting their means of expression according to the knowledge status of their listener–. Further studies are needed to examine to what extent the three factors have an influence on the acquisition of survey map perspec-tives and on how those factors interrelate. In parallel with this, it would also be neces-sary to investigate the development of meta-communicative abilities, including how the deliberate use of a gesture space or a descriptive strategy is related to changes in large-scale representations. At the same time, studies are needed to reveal the consis-tency or variability of perspectives taken by each individual child.
By focusing on spontaneous gestures, this study suggests that a survey map per-spective, which has been believed to be acquired around the middle grades in school age children, is already starting to be acquired from a late preschool age. The study suggests that spontaneous gestures can be a useful index for understanding a speaker’s spatial knowledge or perspective.
Chapter 13. The development of spatial perspective
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Elena Levy for her valuable suggestions and comments on earlier drafts.
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