Young children are natural pedagogues

Abstract

Young children are sensitive to ostensive cues (OC), a specific set of communication signals which denote a learning context. This endows human communication with a protocol – termed natural pedagogy – adapted to transmit knowledge. It remains unknown whether children spontaneously communicate in this protocol. Here, we show that children display a broad repertoire of ostensive signals during pedagogically relevant moments of their discourse. We introduce an experimental setup where an adult actor plays erroneously a simple inference game which the child has previously learned how to play. This naturally shifts the child from a student to a teacher's role in the educational dialog. In Study 1 (n = 31), we examine children's use of ostensive cues and gestures as they develop their explanations (3–5 and 6–8-years old). We demonstrate that all children use non-verbal behaviors specifically during moments of pedagogical relevance and the dynamics’ use of ostensive signals change through childhood. In Study 2 (n = 16), the adult pupil minimizes all reception to non-linguistic OC and gestures. This resulted in a decrease of children's frequency of OC during pedagogical episodes but did not affect other gesturing behavior. In Study 3 (n = 15) we show that decreasing ostension during children's history of instruction does not decrease their own ostension while teaching. This rejects the hypothesis that children teach by simple imitation of their learning experience and showed instead, that they can diagnose the sources of the adult pupil's failure and adjust their own teaching accordingly. Together, these results demonstrate that children are spontaneously tuned in the emitter side of natural pedagogy.