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FIRST WORDS IN LANGUAGE AND ACTION: A QUALITATIVE LOOK
Abstract
Strong correspondences have been found between symbol development in play and language in three aspects: (1) correlations in frequency and rate, (2) overlap in referential content, and (3) parallels in qualitative levels and sequences of development. Within language, a developmental progression has been found from what is termed “nonreferential” to “referential” uses of words. The nonreferential words are not names for actions or entities; rather, they are procedures that are used in restricted contexts that may include particular actions or entities. At each developmental level, the difference between substantives and function words has to do with the kinds of referents—entities, events, relationships—involved in that language game or procedure. However, both kinds of words are in themselves functions. The field of child language research has been divided regarding: (1) the developmental levels of word use—that is, in terms of contextual freedom, (2) the kinds of features that predominate in the rules for using words, (3) the structure of the categories that underlie word use, and (4) individual differences in the things that children want to accomplish with words.
... Gesture and speech develop together in infancy, playing an important role in language development (e.g., Capirci & Volterra, 2008;Colletta et al., 2015;Goldin-Meadow, 2007;Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). Gestures have been found to appear before language (e.g., Volterra et al., 1979;Liszkowski, 2008) and to pave the way for later linguistic development (e.g., Morford & Goldin-Meadow, 1992;Capirci et al., 1996Capirci et al., , 2005Butcher & Goldin-Meadow, 2000;Özçalışkan & Goldin-Meadow, 2005 Regarding child development, studies have highlighted the positive role of teachers' gestures in the learning processes (e.g., Goldin-Meadow et al., 1999;Valenzano et al., 2003). There is evidence that representational gestures facilitate math lesson understanding (e.g., Congdon et al., 2017;Ping & Goldin-Meadow, 2008) and benefit the comprehension of complex syntactic and/or semantic structures (e.g., McGregor et al., 2009;Theakston et al., 2014). ...
This thesis proposes an overview of the theoretical background on embodied cognition. gesture studies, and L2 phonological acquisition to motivate the use of embodied prosodic training with hand gestures and kinesthetic movements as an efficient method to improve L2 learners' perception and pronunciation. It is composed of three independent empirical studies looking at three different techniques in different learning contexts.
... A child develops deictic gestures (i.e., pointing gestures) for intentional communication at 8-10 months of age (Bates & Snyder, 1987;, followed by the use of first word. By 18-20 months of age, gesture-word and gesturegesture combinations for communication are noted Caselli, 1990;Volterra, Bates, Benigni, Bretherton, & Camaioni, 1979) while the word combinations are beginning in the verbal language. Children show a preference for spoken language at two years of age, but the gestures continue to scaffold their complex cognitive skills of language processing (Capone & McGregor, 2004). ...
... The different developmental patterns of actions and gestures among HR groups may have cascading effects in other domains. In particular, there is an established developmental link between gestures, play actions, and language learning (e.g., Iverson et al., 1994;LeBarton et al., 2015;Roemer et al., 2019;Sparaci et al., 2018;Volterra et al., 1979). Infant actions and gestures frequently elicit verbal responses from caregivers (Bornstein & Tamis-LeMonda, 1989). ...
Purpose
Infants with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) produce fewer play actions and gestures than neurotypical infants (e.g., Mastrogiuseppe et al., 2015; Veness et al., 2012; Zwaigenbaum et al., 2005). The purpose of this study was to investigate whether different “types” of actions and gestures are more or less likely to develop atypically in ASD.
Method
We examined eight types of actions and gestures longitudinally from ages 8 to 14 months in 80 infants with a heightened risk for developing ASD by virtue of having an affected older sibling (high risk [HR]; e.g., Ozonoff et al., 2011) and 25 infants with no such familial risk (low risk). Data were collected using the MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (Fenson et al., 1994, 1993).
Results
HR infants later diagnosed with ASD showed less growth across nearly all types of actions and gestures compared to the low-risk comparison group. Importantly, these HR infants who were later diagnosed with ASD also exhibited reduced growth in frequent deictic gestures and in actions that involve object manipulation relative to HR infants with non-ASD language delay.
Conclusions
During infancy, it is challenging for clinicians to distinguish ASD from other early communicative delays (e.g., Camarata, 2014). Our results indicate that deictic gestures, as well as actions and gestures involving object manipulation, may be useful targets of surveillance strategies for HR infants and could support early detection efforts for ASD.
... Despite ever-growing evidence for the integrated nature of speech and gesture, many empirical studies still view gestures as serving mainly a compensatory function. For example, in many studies of infants or very young children, gestures are described as behaviors preceding and preparing for language (Bates, 1979;Volterra et al., 1979;Liszkowski, 2008), paving the way for and predicting later linguistic development (e.g., Morford and Goldin-Meadow, 1992;Iverson et al., 1994;Capirci et al., 1996Capirci et al., , 2005Butcher and Goldin-Meadow, 2000;Özçalişkan and Goldin-Meadow, 2005;Pizzuto et al., 2005), and even facilitating access to the child lexicon (e.g., Pine et al., 2007). Gestures are thus generally implicitly described as having a facilitating function. ...
There is plenty of evidence that speech and gesture form a tightly integrated system, as reflected in parallelisms in language production, comprehension, and development (McNeill, 1992; Kendon, 2004). Yet, it is a common assumption that speakers use gestures to compensate for their expressive difficulties, a notion found in developmental studies of both first and second language acquisition, and in theoretical proposals concerning the gesture-speech relationship. If gestures are compensatory, they should mainly occur in disfluent stretches of speech. However, the evidence is sparse and conflicting. This study extends previous studies and tests the putative compensatory role of gestures by comparing the gestural behavior in fluent vs. disfluent stretches of narratives by competent speakers in two languages (Dutch and Italian), and by language learners (children and adult L2 learners). The results reveal that (1) in all groups speakers overwhelmingly produce gestures during fluent speech and only rarely during disfluencies. However, L2 learners are significantly more likely to gesture in disfluency than the other groups; (2) in all groups gestures during disfluencies tend to be holds; (3) in all groups the rare gestures completed in disfluencies have both referential and pragmatic functions. Overall, the data strongly suggest that when speech stops, so does gesture. The findings constitute an important challenge to both gesture and language acquisition theories assuming a mainly (lexical) compensatory role for (referential) gestures. Instead, the results provide strong support for the notion that speech and gestures form an integrated system.
Both intersubjectivity and embodied cognitive processes are based on mechanisms for sharing actions, common to the species. The evolution of spoken language and of communication systems in general are good examples of this. In the present review, we propose that, by a process of observation and imitation, the sharing of object-directed actions (i.e., transitive arm/hand actions) and their pantomimes could have been used to progressively construct communication systems capable of representing action meaning (i.e., their goals). Starting from this process of observation and imitation, humans may have constructed progressively more complex communication systems based on iconic and symbolic arm gestures. These communication systems may have gradually been translated into more specific, buccal, gesture-based systems that gave rise to spoken language. In support of these hypotheses, we report evidence showing that the execution and observation of transitive actions and their pantomimes affects the production of phonological units. We describe the effects of the production and observation of symbolic gestures on word pronunciation. Finally, we report evidence that these systems relating gesture to speech have neural correlates in neural circuits located in the frontal cortex, understood to be involved in spoken language..
In the first years of life, infants rapidly acquire a series of new motor skills. They learn to sit independently, to walk with skill, and to engage in a wide variety of interactions with objects. Over these same years, infants also begin to develop language. These are not isolated events. In a complex developing system, even small changes in one domain can have far‐reaching effects on development in other domains. This is the fundamental idea behind the rich framework known as the developmental cascades perspective. Here we employ this framework to show how early motor advances can exert downstream effects on the development of language. Focusing first on the emergence of independent sitting, then on the development of walking, and finally on changes in the ways in which infants act on and combine actions on objects, we describe how the nature and quality of infant actions change dramatically over the first few years and how this brings with it new possibilities for engaging the environment, more sophisticated ways of interacting with people, and significant alterations in communications directed by caregivers to the infant and coordinated with infant action in time and in meaning. The developmental cascades framework provides an approach for understanding how advances in motor skills influence communicative and language development, and more generally, for conceptualizing the constant, dynamic, and complex interplay between developing infants and their environments as it unfolds over time.
This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language Acquisition
Psychology > Motor Skill and Performance
Psychology > Development and Aging
Infant symbolic play and language acquisition have long been linked. While both activities are inherently social and their acquisition is typically scaffolded by a competent other (Vygotsky, 1978), most studies investigating the symbolic play-language link have considered it in contexts of solitary play. This thesis examines the dynamic nature of the relationship in a semi-naturalistic setting. Fifty-two infant-caretaker dyads engaged in a 20-minute play session that manipulated play type through the use of different toy sets (symbolic versus non-symbolic). Study 1 showed that play contexts influenced language: in symbolic play, infants spoke more and their language and interactions were more complex. CDS was more interactionally demanding (more questions and mimetics) in symbolic play, while in non-symbolic play it was more directive (imperatives and naming). Study 2 established that conversational turn dynamics patterns differed: there were more conversational turns in symbolic play, turn transitions were longer, and infants were more likely to control entire turn sequences. Study 3 demonstrated that symbolic play allowed for greater and richer content alignment: there were more semantic repetitions and infants were more likely to choose the topic of conversation than their parents. Study 4 revealed more complex and demanding epistemic exchanges of information in symbolic play: infants were more likely to inform, assert, and build on previous information when they spoke. Parents were more likely to actively engage the infants in symbolic play by seeking or requesting information, but the ambiguity of symbolic play also meant that it was more difficult for participants to understand each other. When combined, the results of these four studies suggest that symbolic play is a challenging but communicatively rich environment for infants' language development, constituting a zone of proximal development deriving from the need to establish shared intentionality during interaction.
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) produce fewer deictic gestures, accompanied by delays/deviations in speech development, compared to typically-developing (TD) children. We ask whether children with ASD—like TD children—show right-hand preference in gesturing and whether right-handed gestures predict their vocabulary size in speech. Our analysis of handedness in gesturing in children with ASD (n = 23, Mage = 30-months) and with TD (n = 23, Mage = 18-months) during mother–child play showed a right-hand preference for TD children—but not for children with ASD. Nonetheless, right-handed deictic gestures predicted expressive vocabulary 1 year later in both children with ASD and with TD. Handedness for gesture, both hand preference and amount of right-handed pointing, may be an important indicator of language development in autism and typical development.
Motor difficulties may be an early Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) risk indicator and may predict subsequent expressive language skills. Further understanding of motor functioning in the first year of life in children with ASD is needed. We examined motor skills in 6-month-olds (n = 140) at high and low familial risk for ASD using the Peabody Developmental Motor Scales (Grasping, Visual-Motor Integration, and Stationary subscales). In Study 1, motor skill at 6 months predicted ASD status at 24–36 months; ASD was associated with poorer infant motor skills. In Study 2, motor skill at 6 months predicted expressive language at 30 and 36 months. Findings provide evidence that vulnerability in motor function early in development is present in ASD. Findings highlight the importance of developmental monitoring in high-risk infants and possible cascading effects of early disruption in motor development.
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