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Children often find it difficult to map verbs to specific referents within complex scenes, often believing that additional features are part of the referents. This study investigated whether 3-year-olds could use iconic gestures to map novel verbs to specific referents. One hundred and twenty children were taught verbs that could be interpreted as change-of-state or manner verbs while presented with manner, end-state, or no iconic gestures. Children were then presented with a choice that forced them to generalize either on the basis of manner or end state. Results showed that children who saw manner gestures showed a stronger manner bias compared to the other groups. Thus, the specific feature of an event encoded in gestures guides children's interpretations of novel words.
