Communicative Faculty

Developmental Science 8:6 (2005), pp 492–499

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Blackwell Publishing, Ltd.

One-year-olds comprehend the communicative intentions behind gestures in a hiding game
Tanya Behne, Malinda Carpenter and Michael Tomasello
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany

Abstract
This study explored infants’ ability to infer communicative intent as expressed innon-linguistic gestures. Sixty children aged 14, 18 and 24 months participated. In the context of a hiding game, an adult indicated for the child the location of a hidden toy by giving a communicative cue: either pointing or ostensive gazing toward the container containing the toy. To succeed in this task children had to do more than just follow the point or gaze to the target container. They also hadto infer that the adult’s behaviour was relevant to the situation at hand – she wanted to inform them that the toy was inside the container toward which she gestured. Children at all three ages successfully used both types of cues. We conclude that infants as young as 14 months of age can, in some situations, interpret an adult behaviour as a relevant communicative act done for them.Introduction
Infants begin to follow the gaze direction of others to nearby targets within their visual field as early as 3 to 6 months of age (D’Entremont, Hains & Muir, 1997), and by around 1 year of age they follow gaze to more distal targets as well (e.g. Corkum & Moore, 1995). They also reliably follow adults’ pointing gestures to moderately distal targets by around their first birthdays (e.g. Carpenter,Nagell & Tomasello, 1998). But following gazing or pointing gestures does not necessarily mean that the infant understands that the adult intends to direct her attention, that is, it does not necessarily mean that the infant understands the adult’s communicative intent. A better situation for assessing whether infants understand communicative intent is one in which the infant follows an adultgesture to an otherwise uninteresting target and in addition makes some inference about why the adult took the trouble to direct her attention to this boring object. Following Sperber and Wilson (1986), we must look for situations in which the infant asks herself: Why did the adult do this for me? Why is this object to which he is gesturing relevant to our interaction? One possible task with thisstructure is the so-called object choice task. In the context of a hiding game, Tomasello, Call and Gluckman (1997) had an adult indicate which of three distinct containers contained a

reward by (a) pointing to the correct container; (b) placing a small wooden marker on the correct container; or (c) holding up an exact replica of the correct container. Children aged 2.5 and 3.0 years not onlyfollowed the adult’s indication to one of the containers, but they also inferred that the hidden reward could be found there (as evidenced by their search behaviour). They treated each communicative attempt as an expression of the adult’s intention to direct their attention in ways relevant to the current interaction/game. In contrast, in the same situation great apes did not infer the location of thehidden food. This was not because they cannot follow the direction of pointing or gazing (they can; see Call & Tomasello, 2005, for a review), but because they did not tune in to the adult’s communicative intention and infer why he was directing their attention to this location. They did not understand that the gesture was made for their benefit, and so they did not seek or find the relevance ofthis act in this context. Three-year-old children can also use gaze direction by itself as a cue in this kind of hiding game. Povinelli, Reaux, Bierschwale, Allain and Simon (1997) found that 3-year-olds successfully located hidden rewards, both when the adult pointed and when she gazed at the baited container. Younger children between 2 and 2.5 years of age reliably used pointing gestures to...