Communication in the second and third year of life: Relationships between nonverbal social skills and language

Abstract

We aimed to investigate developmental continuities between a range of early social and communicative abilities (including gestural communication) and language acquisition in children aged between 11 and 41 months. Initiation of joint attention and imitation were strongly correlated to language comprehension and production. Moreover, the analysis of different communicative gestures revealed significant relationships between language development and the production of symbolic gestures, declarative pointing (declarative informative pointing in particular), and head nodding. Other gestures such as imperative pointing, showing, and head shaking were not found to correlate with language level. Our results also suggest that distinct processes are involved in the development of language comprehension and production, and highlight the importance of considering various characteristics of children's early communicative skills.

Manual asymmetries and hemispheric specialization: Insight from developmental studies

“…Direction of handedness was generally consistent across the two types of activities (mean handedness indexes were not found to differ), although variations were reported in the strength of hand preference. However, a more complex picture emerges when distinguishing between right-handers and nonright-handers (including both left-handers and children showing no preference): the former were found to be strongly lateralized for both communicative gestures and non-communicative reaching actions, whereas the latter, strongly left-handed for reaching actions, predominantly used their right hand for pointing gestures and symbolic gestures (Cochet and Byrne, 2015;. By contrast, left-handed adults were shown to preferentially use their left hand to produce pointing gestures in similar contexts, i.e., contexts in which spontaneous behaviors are recorded (Cochet and Vauclair, 2012).…”

What can autism teach us about the role of sensorimotor systems in higher cognition? New clues from studies on language, action semantics, and abstract emotional concept processing

“…The development of rhythmic arm movements, i.e., shaking a rattle, slightly precedes or coincides with vocal babbling (Bates & Dick, 2002;Iverson, Hall, Nickel, & Wozniak, 2007;Locke, Bekken, Mcminnlarson, & Wein, 1995), and is suggested to afford infants the ability to practice the skills underlying rhythmic, timed vocalisations and to receive multimodal feedback on their actions (Iverson, 2010;Iverson & Thelen, 1999;Thelen, 1995). Certain hand and head gestures are predictive of language comprehension and vocabulary in young children (Cochet & Byrne, 2016;Hsu & Iyer, 2016;€ Ozç alıs ‚ kan, Adamson, & Dimitrova, 2015), as are facets of social development like joint attention (simplistically, the ability to understand pointing gestures, manifest in looking to where a finger points, rather than at the pointing finger; to share the attentional focus of another person through being directed via non-verbal [eye-gaze, pointing] or verbal means). Joint attention, in turn, also relies on motor development (Campos et al, 2000), and is strongly linked to learning wordobject relationships (Baldwin, 1995).…”

Intention or Attention Before Pointing: Do Infants’ Early Holdout Gestures Reflect Evidence of a Declarative Motive?

“…Indeed, declarative pointing shares several traits with language, including the ability to share and understand other people's attention and intentions. This ability is thought to underpin the established relation between prelinguistic gestures and later language acquisition (Carpenter, Nagell, Tomasello, Butterworth, & Moore, ; Liszkowski, ; Matthews, Behne, Lieven, & Tomasello, ), as well as with later theory of mind abilities (Cochet & Byrne, ). The production of declarative pointing from 12 months has been extensively studied, and its developmental trajectory has been established in terms of both form and function (Behne, Carpenter, & Tomasello, ; Cochet & Vauclair, ).…”