To learn from others, children rely on cues (e.g., familiarity, confidence) to infer who around them will provide useful information. We extended this research to ask whether children will use an informant’s inclination to gesture as a marker of whether or not the informant is a good person to learn from. Children (N = 459, ages 4–12 years) watched short videos in which actresses made statements accompanied by meaningful iconic gestures, beat gestures (which act as prosodic markers with speech), or no gestures. After each trial, children were asked “Who do you think would be a good teacher?” (good teacher [experimental] condition) or “Who do you think would be a good friend?” (good friend [control] condition). Results show that children do believe that someone who produces iconic gesture would make a good teacher compared with someone who does not, but this is only later in childhood and only if children have the propensity to see gesture as meaningful. The same effects were not found in the good friend condition, indicating that children’s responses are not just about liking an adult who gestures more. These findings have implications for how children attend to and learn from instructional gesture.

为了向他人学习，孩子们依靠线索（例如，熟悉度、信心）来推断他们周围的人会提供有用的信息。我们扩展了这项研究，询问儿童是否会使用线人的手势倾向作为线人是否是一个值得学习的好人的标志。儿童（N  = 459，年龄 4-12 岁）观看了短视频，在这些短片中，女演员发表声明并伴有有意义的标志性手势、节拍手势（作为语音的韵律标记）或没有手势。每次试验结束后，孩子们都会被问到“你认为谁会是一名好老师？” （好老师[实验]条件）或“你认为谁会是好朋友？” （好朋友[控制]条件）。结果表明，孩子们相信能做出标志性手势的人与不做标志性手势的人相比会成为一名好老师，但这只是在童年后期，而且只有当孩子们倾向于将手势视为有意义的时候。在好朋友条件下没有发现同样的效果，这表明孩子的反应不仅仅是喜欢一个做手势更多的成年人。这些发现对儿童如何注意和学习教学手势具有重要意义。