Hands On: Nonverbal Communication in Native and Non-Native American Parent–Child Dyads During Informal Learning

Parent–child communication is a rich, multimodal process. Substantial research has documented the communicative strategies in certain (predominantly White) United States families, yet we know little about these communicative strategies in Native American families. The current study addresses that gap by documenting the verbal and nonverbal behaviors used by parents and their 4-year-old children (N = 39, 25 boys)across two communities: Menominee families (low to middle income) living on tribal lands in ruralWisconsin, and non-Native, primarily White families (middle income) living in an urban area. Dyads participated in a free-play forest-diorama task designed to elicit talk and play about the natural world. Childrenfrom both communities incorporated actions and gestures freely in their talk, emphasizing the importance ofconsidering nonverbal behaviors when evaluating what children know. In sharp contrast to the stereotypethat Native American children talk very little, Menominee children talked more than their non-Native counterparts, underlining the importance of taking into account cultural context in child assessments. For childrenand parents across both communities, gestures were more likely than actions to be related to the content ofspeech and were more likely than actions to be produced simultaneously with speech. This tight couplingbetween speech and gesture replicates and extends prior research with predominantly White (and adult)samples. These findings not only broaden our theories of communicative interaction and development, butalso provide new evidence about the role of nonverbal behaviors in informal learning contexts.