Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 96, Issue 3, July 2005, Pages B101-B113
Cognition

Brief article
Gesture is at the cutting edge of early language development

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2005.01.001Get rights and content

Abstract

Children who produce one word at a time often use gesture to supplement their speech, turning a single word into an utterance that conveys a sentence-like meaning (‘eat’+point at cookie). Interestingly, the age at which children first produce supplementary gesture–speech combinations of this sort reliably predicts the age at which they first produce two-word utterances. Gesture thus serves as a signal that a child will soon be ready to begin producing multi-word sentences. The question is what happens next. Gesture could continue to expand a child's communicative repertoire over development, combining with words to convey increasingly complex ideas. Alternatively, after serving as an opening wedge into language, gesture could cease its role as a forerunner of linguistic change. We addressed this question in a sample of 40 typically developing children, each observed at 14, 18, and 22 months. The number of supplementary gesture–speech combinations the children produced increased significantly from 14 to 22 months. More importantly, the types of supplementary combinations the children produced changed over time and presaged changes in their speech. Children produced three distinct constructions across the two modalities several months before these same constructions appeared entirely within speech. Gesture thus continues to be at the cutting edge of early language development, providing stepping-stones to increasingly complex linguistic constructions.

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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