|
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 practicing 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
|
80px.gif)
.gif)
