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

Abstract

Gestures are the first signs of intentional communication within prelinguistic infants and can reflect various motives, including a declarative motive to share attention and interest. The ability to use gestures declaratively has been linked to later language development; therefore, it is important to understand the origins of this motive. Previous research has focused on the use of declarative pointing at around 12 months; however, other potential forms of declarative communication, such as holdout gestures, are yet to be studied in detail. The purpose of this study was to examine whether from 10 months, infants use holdouts declaratively. We elicited holdouts from 36 infants and then reacted to these gestures in four different conditions: (1) joint attention: shared interest; (2) infant attention: attended to infant; (3) toy attention: attended to toy; (4) ignore: gesture was not attended to. Infants' behavioral responses were recorded. When the experimenter engaged in joint attention, infants were significantly more likely to display a positive attitude and produced fewer re-engagement attempts. In contrast, the three non-joint attention conditions displayed significantly higher negative attitudes and attempts to re-engage the experimenter. We conclude that infants display declarative communication prior to 12 months, resetting the age at which these more complex skills emerge.Correspondence should be sent to Thea Cameron-Faulkner, School of Arts, Languages and Cultures,

A Cross‐Cultural Analysis of Early Prelinguistic Gesture Development and Its Relationship to Language Development

“…Index finger pointing and HoGs gestures are claimed to be more cognitively complex than reaching gestures as they require the infant to have some understanding of the cognitive effects of their actions on others (e.g., Tomasello, 1999) and therefore provide infants with a practice ground for the subsequent emergence of language. In terms of the relationship between HoG and points, we only found a positive relationship in the English sample and so the data provide limited support for claims that these early communicative gestures have developmental significance for the emergence of index finger pointing (e.g., Bates et al, 1975; Boundy, Cameron‐Faulkner, & Theakston, 2019; Cameron‐Faulkner et al, 2015). It is possible that these findings indicate cultural differences, however, a word of caution in interpreting the results of these models is in order, due to low statistical power.…”

Infants’ intentionally communicative vocalizations elicit responses from caregivers and are the best predictors of the transition to language: A longitudinal investigation of infants’ vocalizations, gestures and word production

“…Since this behaviour was almost always gaze‐coordinated, it is impossible to test whether specifically gaze‐coordinated instances of the gesture were predictive. While it is likely that this gesture is produced with communicative intent (Boundy et al, ), this is hard to unpack using our data. However, we have demonstrated the link between showing and later language that has been hypothesized, but empirically tested only once, on a small sample (Bates et al, ).…”

“…Giving and showing gestures (both coordinated with gaze at above chance levels) are adult‐directed, and the physical configuration of showing in particular (holding objects up to caregiver's face) likely facilitates infants’ looking to their caregivers’ face more readily than with pointing to other entities. Likewise, giving and showing gestures involve objects within the infant's grasp, while pointing (especially in relation to more distal stimuli) is thought to be more cognitively complex, perhaps accounting for greater difficulty in gaze‐coordination at this age (see also Boundy, Cameron‐Faulkner, & Theakston, ; Carpenter et al, ).…”

Showing and giving: from incipient to conventional forms

“…More generally, this study has not only joined other recent work in calling for greater attention to be paid to infants' showing and giving gestures [14][15][16][17][18], but has also stressed the importance of understanding the developmental pathway that leads to the emergence of conventional showing, giving and other gestures. Pursuing this question further will help contribute to an understanding of humans' early capacity and motivation for social interaction, as well as the core role played by gestures [36].…”