Brief articleGesture is at the cutting edge of early language development
Section snippets
Gesture's role in early language-learning
At a certain stage in the process of learning language, children produce one word at a time. They have words that refer to objects and people and words that refer to actions and properties in their productive vocabularies (Nelson, 1973). However, they do not combine these words into sentence-like strings.
Interestingly, at the earliest stages of language learning, children also fail to combine their words with gesture. They use deictic gestures to point out objects, people, and places in the
Sample and data collection
Forty children (21 girls, 19 boys) were videotaped in their homes at 14, 18, and 22 months while interacting with their primary caregivers. The children's families were representative of the population in the greater Chicago area in terms of ethnic composition and income distribution (see Table 1), and children were being raised as monolingual English speakers. Each session lasted 90 minutes, and caregivers were asked to interact with their children as they normally would and ignore the
Children's early speech and gesture production
Not surprisingly, children's speech improved with age (see Table 3). Children produced more communicative acts containing speech (F(2,78)=51.58, P<0.001), more different word types (F(2,78)=70.90, P<0.001), and more words overall (i.e. tokens, F(2,78)=40.04, P<0.001) with increasing age. There was a significant increase in all three measures from 14 to 18 months (Scheffé, P<0.05) and from 18 to 22 months (Scheffé, P<0.001). The majority of the children in the sample were already producing
Discussion
We have examined very young children's gesture–speech combinations as they progressed from one-word speech to multi-word combinations. Over this period, children produced more and more gesture–speech combinations in which gesture supplemented the information conveyed in speech (e.g. “eat”+point at muffin). More importantly, the types of supplementary gesture–speech combinations that children produced changed over time and presaged changes in their speech. Children did not routinely produce
Acknowledgements
We thank Kristi Schoendube and Jason Voigt for their administrative and technical support and the project research assistants, Karyn Brasky, Kristin Duboc, Molly Nikolas, Jana Oberholtzer, Lilia Rissman, Becky Seibel, and Julie Wallman, for their help in collecting and transcribing the data. The research presented in this paper was supported by grant #PO1 HD406-05 to Goldin-Meadow.
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