Sensitive Caregiving Fosters the Comprehension of Speech: When Gestures Speak Louder than Words

Abstract

Despite a variety of theoretical arguments to the contrary, sensitive caregiving makes an important contribution to the comprehension and emergence of speech. This research, informed by social ecological realism, documented that during the prelinguistic and one-word periods, caregivers routinely provided additional perceptual structure to their infants following communicative breakdowns. This sensitive adjusting of subsequent messages to infants contributed significantly to reaching a common understanding. Caregivers also modified their verbal messages in subsequent turns by making them more specific. In contrast, however, these elaborations did not contribute to achieving a practical consensus regarding ongoing events. These results suggest that the social ecological realist approach informing this research has important implications for theory, reviewing past empirical findings and future research. 0 1996 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Early D e n Parent. 5: [195][196][197][198][199][200][201][202][203][204][205][206][207][208][209][210][211] 1996 the interactive origins of speech comprehension during the pre-linguistic period. How caregivers sensitively make speech comprehensible to infants during the second half of the first year of life as well as during the one-word period remains relatively unexplored. Among the exceptions, Harris et al. (1983) and Messer (1983) document the close coupling of caregiver speech and actions prior to and after infants' first words. Another body of research provides some suggestive clues. Many researchers have confirmed that caregiver methods for focusing the attention of their infants during the one-word period and beyond contribute to the emergence of the lexicon (Adamson et al

Intermodal synchrony as a form of maternal responsiveness

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Gesture's Role in Speaking, Learning, and Creating Language

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Learning words by hand: Gesture's role in predicting vocabulary development

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