Gesture and the emergence and development of language

During the autumn of 2002, just a few weeks before we would discover about her disease, Liz and I were walking through Rome, talking about work and a dream we had. We wanted to write something together again, something about gesture—a topic in which we had been interested since we started our lifelong collaboration and profound friendship, about thirty years ago. We were aware that many of our old ideas about the role of gesture in children’s linguistic development were suddenly becoming extremely “modern” and we were planning to articulate our current perspective (old and new at the same time) by doing a critical review of recent work carried on in different laboratories and countries. As we had done many times in the past, we started to write the manuscript “a due mani” (two-handed) but despite the attempts we made during the first half of this awful 2003, we did not have enough energy to complete that work. The present chapter is meant to be a modest, partial attempt to realize that dream: it has been written “a quattro mani” (four-handed) by four people of the “Nomentana Lab” who share a common debt: a debt of immense gratitude to Liz who has forever marked their life with her unique, intense depth and generosity, as a scientist and as a human being.

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