Developmental Pathways Between Infant Gestures and Symbolic Actions, and Children’s Communicative Skills at Age 5: Findings From the All Our Families Pregnancy Cohort

Morin-Lessard, Elizabeth; Hentges, Rochelle F.; Tough, Suzanne; Graham, Susan A.

doi:10.1111/cdev.13567

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 59 publications

(112 reference statements)

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“…A related possibility is that, at this young age, infants do not use gestures to compensate for lexical retrieval difficulties. As found in previous studies of monolingual children (Blake et al, 2003;Morin-Lessard et al, 2021;Özçalışkan et al, 2017), we generally observed positive correlations between communicative gestures and vocabulary size. Thus, at this age, gesture repertoire appears to develop alongside stronger verbal language skills, rather than compensating for weaker skills.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Gesture development in infancy: Effects of gender but not bilingualism

Germain

Gonzalez-Barrero

Byers‐Heinlein

2022

Infancy

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Gesture is an important communication tool that provides insight into infants' early language and cognitive development and predicts later language skills. While bilingual school-age children have been reported to gesture more than monolinguals, there is a lack of research examining gesture use in infants exposed to more than one language.In this preregistered study, we compared three groups of 14-month-old infants (N = 150) learning French and/or English: bilinguals (hearing a second language at least 25% of the time), exposed (hearing a second language 10%-24% of the time), and monolinguals (hearing one language 90% of the time or more). Parent-reported use of communicative gestures was gathered from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI). Resultsshowed that the three language groups had similarly sized gesture repertoires, suggesting that language exposure did not affect gesture development at this age. However, a gender effect was found, where girls produced more types of gestures than boys. Overall, these results suggest that gender, but not language exposure, contributes to differences in gesture development in infancy.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Gesture development in infancy: Effects of gender but not bilingualism

Germain

Gonzalez-Barrero

Byers‐Heinlein

2022

Infancy

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“…This drove mothers to provide more symbolic feedback. Our results may explain previous results that associated gestures with the growth of symbolic skills (Marentette et al., 2016; Miller et al., 2020; Morin‐Lessard et al., 2021; Orr, 2018). Overall, this study determined that maternal responses are dynamic in many respects.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 88%

The context of infants' giving gestures in mother‐infant dyads: Typical giving gestures and those contingent on exploration and play

Orr¹,

Rosenbaum

2023

Infancy

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This study aimed to focus on a niche that has not yet been investigated in infants' gesture studies that is the effect of the prior context of one specific gestural behavior (gives) on maternal behavior. For this purpose, we recruited 23 infants at 11 and 13 months of age yielded 246 giving gesture bouts that were performed in three contexts: typical when the object was offered immediately, contingent on exploration, and contingent on play. The analysis revealed that maternal responses to infants' giving gestures varied and were affected by their age and gesture context. Hence, mothers amended their responses according to the background that generated each gesture. The number of verbal responses to infants' giving gestures decreased as the infants aged, whereas the number of pretense responses increased. For infants aged 11 months, mothers generally provided motor responses to typical gestures. However, for infants aged 13 months, this trend declined and was replaced by a strong positive correlation between giving gestures contingent on play and verbal responses. We concluded that the type of activity with objects prior to employing giving gestures could enhance infants' symbolic skills because caregivers monitor the contingent act that yields the gesture that shapes their response.

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“…Importantly, these behavioral changes have been linked to later language abilities, including productive vocabulary and vocabulary growth up to 30 months of age ( Brooks and Meltzoff, 2008 ; Kuhl et al, 2008 , 2005 ; Morales et al, 2000 , 1998 ; Morin-Lessard et al, 2021 ; Rivera-Gaxiola et al, 2005 ; Singh et al, 2012 ; Tsao et al, 2004 ), language and preliteracy skills ( Cardillo, 2010 ; Cardillo Lebedeva and Kuhl, 2009 ), general communication skills at 5 years of age ( Morin-Lessard et al, 2021 ), and expressive grammar skills at 6 years of age ( Zhao et al, 2021 ). Thus there is strong evidence that these behaviorally observed changes are important for the development of later, more advanced language skills.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%