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Research: gesture paves the way for language development
1 Jan 2005
Research report. Jana M Iverson, University of Pittsburgh, and Susan Goldin-Meadow, University of Chicago.
Abstract
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.
Discussion
We have found that gesture both precedes and is tightly related to language development. At the lexical level, items found initially in children's gestural repertoires subsequently appeared in their verbal lexicons. At the sentence level, the onset of gesture-plus-word combinations conveying two elements of a proposition predicted with great precision the onset of two-word combinations. Our findings are thus consistent with the hypothesis that gesture plays a facilitating role in early language development.
What might gesture be doing to facilitate language learning? One possibility is that gesture serves as a signal to the child's communicative partner that the child is ready for a particular kind of verbal input. Consider a child who points at his or her father's hat while saying “dada”. The child's caregiver might respond by saying: "Yes, that's daddy's hat”, in effect translating the child's gesture-plus-word combination into a two-word utterance and providing the child with timely verbal input. Indeed, adults have been found to alter their input to older children on the basis of the gestures that the children produce.
Gesture may also play a role in language learning by affecting the learners themselves. Although gesture and speech form a single integrated system, gesture exploits different representational resources than does speech. Meanings that lend themselves to visuospatial representation may be easier to express in gesture than in speech. Indeed, children on the cusp of mastering a task often produce strategies for solving the task in gesture before producing them in speech.
In addition to relying on a different representational format, gesture lessens demands on memory. Pointing at an object is likely to put less strain on memory than producing a word for that object. Moreover, gesturing while speaking has been found to save speakers cognitive effort; consequently, it may be cognitively less demanding to express a proposition in a gesture-plus-word combination than in two words.
Gesture may thus provide a way for new meanings to enter children's communicative repertoires. It may also give children a means for practising these new meanings, laying the foundation for their eventual appearance in speech. There is, in fact, evidence that the act of gesturing can itself promote learning.
In sum, our findings underscore the tight link between gesture and speech, even in children at the earliest stages of language learning. At minimum, gesture is a harbinger of change in the child's developing language system, as it is in other cognitive systems later in development. Gesture may even pave the way for future developments in language.
(Psychological Science, Volume 16 - Number 5)
A full copy of the research report can be downloaded at
http://goldin-meadow-lab.uchicago.edu/PDF/2005/Iverson_GM2005.pdf.
