{"pk":29403,"title":"Can Automated Gesture Recognition Support the Study of Child LanguageDevelopment?","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Children’s prelinguistic gestures play a central role in theircommunicative development. Early gesture use has beenshown to be predictive of both concurrent and later languageability, making the identification of gestures in video data atscale a potentially valuable tool for both theoretical and clini-cal purposes. We describe a new dataset consisting of videos of72 infants interacting with their caregivers at 11&12 months,annotated for the appearance of 12 different gesture types. Wepropose a model based on deep convolutional neural networksto classify these. The model achieves 48.32% classification ac-curacy overall, but with significant variation between gesturetypes. Critically, we found strong (0.7 or above) rank ordercorrelations between by-child gesture counts from human andmachine coding for 7 of the 12 gestures (including the criticalgestures of declarative pointing, hold outs and gives). Giventhe challenging nature of the data - recordings of many differ-ent dyads in different environments engaged in diverse activi-ties - we consider these results a very encouraging first attemptat the task, and evidence that automatic or machine-assistedgesture identification could make a valuable contribution to thestudy of cognitive development.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Deep learning"},{"word":"child gesture recognition"},{"word":"languagedevelopment."}],"section":"Language Development","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0h79k11v","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Soumitra","middle_name":"","last_name":"Samanta","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Liverpool","department":""},{"first_name":"Colin","middle_name":"","last_name":"Bannard","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Liverpool","department":""},{"first_name":"Julian","middle_name":"","last_name":"Pine","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Liverpool","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29403/galley/19263/download/"}]}