News Finding: "We thought that we might find a few of these gestures -- reaching out your palm to ask for something or sticking your hand up in the air -- but we were amazed to see so many of the 'ape' gestures used by the children," Dr. Hobaiter said.
Paper Finding: The single use cases would not normally be included in a gestural repertoire, see above, but are included here for completeness given the small data set.
News Context: The study authors were surprised by just how many gestures the children had in common with our ape cousins. "We thought that we might find a few of these gestures -- reaching out your palm to ask for something or sticking your hand up in the air -- but we were amazed to see so many of the 'ape' gestures used by the children," Dr. Hobaiter said. The researchers found that like young apes, the young children used these gestures in a similar way: combining them together to ask for different things.
Paper Context: However, 7 of these were only coded as used in intentional communication on a single occasion, and the other 4 on n = 2 occasions. The single use cases would not normally be included in a gestural repertoire, see above, but are included here for completeness given the small data set. Given both the correlation between frequency of gesturing and number of gesture types used described above, and the correlation between the number of times a gesture occurred in a child's repertoire and its frequency in the data set (Pearson's correlation, r = 0.80, n = 51, P < 0.0001), the individual repertoires and the frequency with which a gesture was used by different children appear to be determinedly largely by sample size in our data.