Speech directed towards young children ("motherese") is subject to consistent systematic modifications. Recent research suggests that gesture directed towards young children is similarly modified (gesturese). It has been suggested that gesturese supports speech, therefore scaffolding communicative development (the facilitative interactional theory). Alternatively, maternal gestural modification may be a consequence of the semantic simplicity of interaction with infants (the interactional artefact theory). The gesture patterns of 12 English mothers were observed with their 20-month-old infants while engaged in two tasks, free play and a counting task, designed to differentially tap into scaffolding. Gestures accounted for 29% of total maternal communicative behaviour. English mothers employed mainly concrete deictic gestures (e.g. pointing) that supported speech by disambiguating and emphasizing the verbal utterance. Maternal gesture rate and informational gesture-speech relationship were consistent across tasks, supporting the interactional artefact theory. This distinctive pattern of gesture use for the English mothers was similar to that reported for American and Italian mothers, providing support for universality. Child-directed gestures are not redundant in relation to child-directed speech but rather both are used by mothers to support their communicative acts with infants.

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This study examines the development of counting and cardinality in a structured sample of 60 English 3 1/2-4 1/2 year-olds attending local education authority nursery classes in socially mixed areas of Portsmouth. Children were given two types of task: counting sets of animals, and giving specified numbers of items from a pile. Three measures of cardinal understanding were used: spontaneous repetition of the last word on completion of a counting trial, repetition of the last word in reply to a question, and use of counting vs. grabbing when asked to give a specific number of items from a heap. In line with research on other populations the results indicate a pronounced developmental discrepancy between procedural and conceptual knowledge of counting, but cardinality appears to develop six months later in this population than in other populations studied. There were marked individual differences, however. Proficiency with object counting was found to be necessary, but not sufficient, for cardinal understanding. Children rarely repeated final count words spontaneously. Last word repetition in response to a verbal prompt depended on the nature of the prompt. Contrary to previous research, the present results indicate that last word repetition elicited by the prompt 'how many?' is not merely a conventional reply but generally implies an understanding of cardinality. The findings also indicate that an understanding of cardinality emerges relatively suddenly, consistent with the discovery or construction of a principle. Whether nursery pupils treat counting simply as a conventional routine without cardinal significance appears to depend on the situation as well as on their understanding of cardinality. The findings are discussed in relation to Karmiloff-Smith's Representational Redescription model.

-This study compares the procedural counting ability (independently and with parental support) and conceptual understanding of cardinality of a group of children with Down syndrome and a group of typically developing children, matched for non-verbal mental age. Participants were 23 children with Down syndrome (chronological age range: 3.5 -7 years; mental age range: 2.5 -4 years) and 20 typically developing children (chronological age range: 2 -4 years; mental age range: 2.5 -4 years), and their main caregiver. The children were asked to count sets of toys (assessing procedural counting skills) and to give sets of toys (assessing understanding of cardinality), with set sizes between 2 and 18 items. The counting task was performed in two conditions, with and without parental support. The children were also asked to say the count word sequence aloud, to assess sequence production independent from object counting. The typically developing children produced signifi cantly more number words altogether, longer standard number sequences and could count larger sets than the children with Down syndrome. Support from an adult improved performance on the count task signifi cantly for both groups of children, and there was no signifi cant difference between the groups in the degree of improvement, i.e. the zone of proximal development. No signifi cant differences were found between the frequency of children (approximately one third) in each group who used counting to solve the give task, indicating an understanding of cardinality.