Constructing a system of communication with gestures and words.

Abstract

Gestures, along with early words, are critical in children's construction of an early system of communication. From as young as 10 months old, children use locating gestures (usually points), iconic or depicting gestures (with or without props), and conventional gestures like waving or nodding, found in a specific cultural group. In this chapter, we trace the burgeoning field of developmental gesture studies and examine the emergence of gestures as visible utterances, adult responses to children's gestures, and the early use of gesture + word combinations that underpin children's early constructions and ongoing communication. We argue that children use gestures to communicate as a crucial part of language development, for example, pointing to focus attention and to inform and reaching to make requests. Children sometimes accompany early gestures with vocalizations to attract attention and elicit a response. Adults also use gestures to communicate: they gesture to enlist and maintain joint attention in their interactions with infants and young children, and they use gesture and speech together to identify objects as members of categories, to indicate their parts and properties, and to demonstrate motion and function.In early studies of child language, gestures were not taken into account. Researchers were concerned with how children advanced from single-word utterances to their first two-word combinations, and the order in which they added inflections and other grammatical morphemes (e.g., Brown, 1973). Later studies began to look at lexical semantics and at how this affected the acquisition of increasingly complex syntactic constructions (e.g.,

Social robots as depictions of social agents

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Exploring the interplay of semantic knowledge in bilingual children: heritage language and second language

“…Word learning involves gradually integrating newly acquired words from episodic experiences into stable lexical representations (Kormi-Nouri et al, 2003;Winocur and Moscovitch, 2011;Tartaro et al, 2021). is process unfolds through repeated interactions with adults, where deictic frames (e.g., gestures and descriptions) play a crucial role in linking new words to speci c entities and experiences (Clark, 2017;Clark and Kelly, 2022).…”

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“…Depicting is also the basis for ideophones such as meow , cock-a-doodle-doo , and oink-oink , and these, too, are part of all languages (Dingemanse, 2013). And children begin to use performed depictions from as young as 18 months of age (Clark & Kelly, 2021). Conclusion: People everywhere use and understand performed depictions as part of everyday communication and from an early age.…”