Gesture Paves the Way for Language Development

In development, children often use gesture to communicate before they use words. The question is whether these gestures merely precede language development or are fundamentally tied to it. We examined 10 children making the transition from single words to two-word combinations and found that gesture had a tight relation to the children's lexical and syntactic development. First, a great many of the lexical items that each child produced initially in gesture later moved to that child's verbal lexicon. Second, children who were first to produce gesture-plus-word combinations conveying two elements in a proposition (point at bird and say “nap”) were also first to produce two-word combinations (“bird nap”). Changes in gesture thus not only predate but also predict changes in language, suggesting that early gesture may be paving the way for future developments in language.

[1]  S. Kita.  Pointing: Where language, culture, and cognition meet , 2003 .

[2]  Susan Goldin-Meadow,et al.  Displaced communication in a self-styled gesture system: Pointing at the nonpresent ☆ , 1991 .

[3]  S Goldin-Meadow,et al.  Gestural communication in deaf children: the effects and noneffects of parental input on early language development. , 1984, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development.

[4]  V. Volterra,et al.  Gestures and words during the transition to two-word speech , 1996, Journal of Child Language.

[5]  Susan Goldin-Meadow,et al.  From children's hands to adults' ears: gesture's role in the learning process. , 2003, Developmental psychology.

[6]  S. Goldin-Meadow,et al.  The mismatch between gesture and speech as an index of transitional knowledge , 1986, Cognition.

[7]  S. Goldin-Meadow,et al.  The Role of Gesture in Learning: Do Children Use Their Hands to Change Their Minds? , 2006 .

[8]  S. Goldin-Meadow,et al.  Pointing Toward Two-Word Speech in Young Children , 2003 .

[9]  Susan Goldin-Meadow,et al.  Language and Gesture: Gesture and the transition from one- to two-word speech: when hand and mouth come together , 2000 .

[10]  Eros Corazza.  Language and Context , 2004 .

[11]  Patricia M. Greenfield,et al.  The structure of communication in early language development , 1979 .

[12]  Susan M. Wagner,et al.  Probing the Mental Representation of Gesture: Is Handwaving Spatial?. , 2004 .

[13]  S. Goldin-Meadow,et al.  Hearing Gesture: How Our Hands Help Us Think , 2003 .

[14]  Susan Goldin-Meadow,et al.  Children Learn When Their Teacher's Gestures and Speech Differ , 2005, Psychological science.

[15]  Susan M. Wagner,et al.  Explaining Math: Gesturing Lightens the Load , 2001, Psychological science.

[16]  Susan Goldin-Meadow,et al.  Transitional knowledge in the acquisition of concepts , 1988 .

[17]  L. Acredolo,et al.  Symbolic gesturing in normal infants. , 1988, Child development.

[18]  Julia S. Falk,et al.  The Development of Language and Language Researchers: Essays in Honor of Roger Brown , 1991 .

[19]  G Rosolato,et al.  Symbol formation. , 1978, The International journal of psycho-analysis.