11.6: Gesture Development

Gesturing

Infants and toddlers use a variety of gestures to communicate. Gestures involve movements of the body, particularly the fingers, hands, and head, that are interpreted as a form of intentional communication (Iverson & Thal, 1998). Children most commonly produce two main types of gestures—deictic and representational (Iverson & Thal, 1998). Deictic gestures, such as pointing, establish reference to indicate or call attention to something and can be used to indicate a wide range of meanings in the immediate environment (Bates, Camaioni, & Volterra, 1975). Infants start to use pointing gestures within the second half of their first year of life and usually before they begin talking. Infants may first use so called whole-hand points, in which the arm and the hand are extended toward a referent, followed by index-finger points, in which the arm and the index finger are clearly extended toward a referent (Lock et al., 1990; Liszkowski & Tomasello, 2011; Lüke et al., 2017). ^{[1] [2]}

Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): examples of whole hand pointing and index-finger pointing (^[3])

The second main type of gestures, representational gestures, identify a referent and carry fixed semantic meaning. Representational gestures may include (a) culturally defined conventional gestures (e.g., shaking head for ‘‘no,’’ waving for ‘‘bye’’), (b) iconic gestures (e.g., moving arms in the air to represent an airplane flying), or (c) baby signs, which involve hand movements deliberately taught by an adult (e.g., bringing the hands together and tapping the fingertips to indicate ‘‘more’’). Gestures provide infants and toddlers a way to refer to objects and events as they are developing spoken language, and provide caregivers an opportunity to contingently respond to and translate the child’s gesture into words (Dimitrova et al., 2016). These bidirectional influences between caregivers and children help scaffold the development of communication and language (LeBarton & Iverson, 2017). ^[1]

Although gestures can be a form of preverbal communication, the use of gestures continues to grow throughout toddlerhood, even with the onset and development of children’s expressive language. Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\)shows the number of gestures produced by a large group of Hebrew-speaking toddlers. At each month during the second year of life, some toddlers produce very few gestures, while others produce a lot. For example, at nineteen months of age, the median is around forty gestures produced. The median is a midpoint, separating the top higher scores from the bottom lower scores. Therefore, this graph shows the large differences in the number of gestures toddlers produce, as some produced only around 30 gestures at nineteen months while others produced nearly twice as many.^[4]

Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): Number of gestures produced from a sample of 881 native Hebrew-speaking children in the second year of life. The results show that as age increased, the gap grew between toddlers ranked at the lowest and highest quantiles in terms of the number of words produced by each group. The gap between the number of words produced by toddlers in the 0.10 and the 0.90 quantiles at 12 months was 24 words, while the gap between the number of words produced by toddlers in the same quantiles at 24 months was 279 words (^[4])

Gesture and Its Relation to Language Acquisition.

Early infant gestures are more than simple motor accomplishments—rather gestures are indicative of a dynamic, social process involving gradual transitions in the way in which infants engage with their physical environment and the people within it. Decades of research have revealed a robust correlation between gesture use and the later development of receptive language (Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009; Rowe, Ozcaliskan, & Goldin-Meadow, 2008; Watt, Wetherby, & Shumway, 2006) and expressive language (Iverson & GoldinMeadow, 2005; Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009). Brooks and Meltzoff (2008) offer a potential explanation for the predictive power of early gestures for later language outcomes. They argue that pointing has a bidirectional function; it aids infants by providing them with a communicative tool, and it makes caregivers more likely to produce the labels that the toddler is pointing at, therefore fostering the infant’s linguistic abilities. Furthermore, by gesturing, children can obtain and maintain attention of the adult, thereby establishing new language learning opportunities (Bates et al., 1979;Capone & McGregor, 2004). Pointing at the beginning of the second year is related to the beginning of word comprehension and production, and it plays a key role in coordinating attention to persons, objects, and events with other people and to labels associated with them (Sansavini et al., 2010; Tomasello et al., 2007). Thus, infants who point less frequently may have fewer opportunities to initiate and maintain joint attention with their caregivers and to associate labels with their referents in daily interactions. ^{[5] [1] [6] [7]}

Gesture and its Relation to Language Delay.

In addition to gesture being positively correlated with later language abilities, gesture is also indicative of children with developmental delays and disabilities. Reduced gesture use has been reported in toddlers with language delays early in development (Hsu & Iyer, 2016; Iverson et al., 2018; Lüke et al., 2017; Manwaring et al., 2019). Language delay can be identified between 18 and 36 months in young children with limited expressive vocabularies, equivalent to the 10th percentile or below compared to normative values, and who are free from cognitive, neurological, socio-emotional, or sensory disabilities (Rescorla, 2011). Research suggests a lower rate of pointing in toddlerhood may be an early marker of language delay (Lüke et al., 2017; Sansavini et al., 2019). Lower production of communicative gestures between 18 and 28 months of age also distinguishes truly delayed late talkers from “late bloomers” (their language development is initially delayed, but they eventually catch up), highlighting the predictive value of measures of gesture use for later expressive language skills (Thal & Tobias, 1992). Taken together, these findings underscore the relevance of gestures in the second year as a potential index of later language acquisition and delay. ^{[1] [7]}

Figure \(\PageIndex{3}\): Toddler producing a gesture. (^[8])

Gesture and its Relation to Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disability that can cause significant social, communication and behavioral challenges. Gesture deficits have been identified as one of the earliest social communication indicators of ASD (Iverson et al., 2018; Mitchell et al., 2006; Yirmiya & Charman, 2010). Young children with ASD may demonstrate particular difficulty with deictic gestures compared to typically developing toddlers (LeBarton & Iverson, 2016; Manwaring et al., 2018; Özçalişkan, Adamson, & Dimitrova, 2016). Studies of infants at increased genetic risk for ASD (due to having an older sibling diagnosed with ASD) indicate that reduced gesture use is present in infancy (Mitchell et al., 2006) and persists over time (Iverson et al., 2018) in infants later diagnosed with ASD. There is emerging evidence showing that social-communication skills in ASD do not differ significantly from typical development during the first year of life, with identical outcomes for typically-developing and high-risk infants who go on to receive an autism diagnosis (Rogers, 2009; Elsabbagh and Johnson, 2016). This trajectory, nevertheless, begins to diverge soon after, with a steady decline in the growth rates of both gesture and language production (Iverson et al., 2017) and a decline in social engagement in toddlers later diagnosed with ASD.^{[9] [1] [6]}

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^[1] Manwaring et al., (2019). The gesture–language association over time in toddlers with and without language delays. Autism & Developmental Language Impairments, 4, 2396941519845545. CC by 4.0

^[2] Lüke et al., (2020). Integrated communication system: Gesture and language acquisition in typically developing children and children with LD and DLD. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 118. CC by 4.0

^[3] Image by Rohlfing et al., (2017). An interactive view on the development of deictic pointing in infancy. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1319. CC by 4.0

^[4] Gendler-Shalev & Dromi (2021). The Hebrew Web Communicative Development Inventory (MB-CDI): Lexical Development Growth Curves. Journal of Child Language, 1-17. CC by 4.0

^[5] Cameron‐Faulkner et al., (2021). A cross‐cultural analysis of early prelinguistic gesture development and Its relationship to language development. Child Development, 92(1), 273-290. CC by 4.0

^[6] Ramos-Cabo et al., (2019). Gesture and language trajectories in early development: An overview from the autism spectrum disorder perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 1211. CC by 4.0

^[7] Sansavini et al., (2019). Low rates of pointing in 18-month-olds at risk for autism spectrum disorder and extremely preterm infants: a common index of language delay? Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2131. CC by 4.0

^[8] Image by Humphrey Muleba on Unsplash

^[9] “What is Autism Spectrum Disorder?” by the CDC is in the public domain.