The Changing Role of Gesture in Linguistic Development: A Developmental Trajectory and a Cross-Cultural Comparison Between British and Finnish Children

Abstract

We studied how gesture use changes with culture, age and increased spoken language competence. A picture-naming task was presented to British (N = 80) and Finnish (N = 41) typically developing children aged 2-5 years. British children were found to gesture more than Finnish children and, in both cultures, gesture production decreased after the age of two. Two-year-olds used more deictic than iconic gestures than older children, and gestured more before the onset of speech, rather than simultaneously or after speech. The British 3- and 5-year-olds gestured significantly more when naming praxic (manipulable) items than non-praxic items. Our results support the view that gesture serves a communicative and intrapersonal function, and the relative function may change with age. Speech and language therapists and psychologists observe the development of children's gestures and make predictions on the basis of their frequency and type. To prevent drawing erroneous conclusions about children's linguistic development, it is important to understand developmental and cultural variations in gesture use.

Gestures and Words in Naming: Evidence From Crosslinguistic and Crosscultural Comparison

“…Overall, children produced more pointing and representational gestures in combination with speech than gestures alone. This is consistent with previous findings that 2‐ and 3‐year‐old children use bimodal combinations more frequently than unimodal gesture expressions in naming tasks (e.g., see Marentette et al., , and Stefanini et al., , for Italian children; Hall et al., , for Australian children; Huttunen et al., , for British children; and Marentette et al., , for Canadian English‐speaking children). However, the Italian children produced significantly more crossmodal combinations of speech and representational gestures than the two English‐speaking groups, who did not differ in this respect.…”

“…Next, we looked at whether the frequencies of pointing and representational gestures produced alone or with the accompanying spoken responses (i.e., unimodal vs. bimodal gesture productions) are equally represented across countries. Typically, 2‐ and 3‐year‐old children use gesture plus speech combinations (i.e., combinations of words with pointing or representational gestures) more frequently than unimodal gesture expressions in naming tasks, which has been shown for Italian children (Marentette et al., , Stefanini et al., ), Australian children (Hall, Rumney, Holler, & Kidd, ), British children (Huttunen et al., ), and Canadian English‐speaking children (Marentette et al., ).…”

“…These picture naming tasks have several advantages: (a) They provide a common set of referents for communication that are known to the experimenter and to the coder; (b) they can be used to test different word types (e.g., nouns vs. predicates); and (c) they provide a controlled linguistic setting allowing for a comparable set of gestures across individuals and between groups (Stefanini, Bello, Caselli, Iverson, & Volterra, ). Using a picture naming task, Huttunen, Pine, Thurnham, and Khan () found that Finnish children aged 2–5 years produced fewer deictic and representational gestures than British children. They argued that the result may reflect the conversational style observed in Finnish adults, which has been described as silence appreciating, slow paced, and receiver oriented.…”

Gesture and Symbolic Representation in Italian and English‐Speaking Canadian 2‐Year‐Olds

“…() reported no group difference in representational gesture frequency. In contrast, Huttunen, Pine, Thurnham, and Khan () found that Finnish preschool‐aged children produced fewer gestures, both deictic and representational, than British children. This effect was particularly noteworthy among the 2‐year‐olds: None of the Finnish children produced representational gestures, while the British children averaged two representational gestures per child in the task.…”

Learning a Second Language Naturally the Voice Movement Icon Approach

“…In a study by Huttunen et al (2013), British and Finnish children aged 2 to 5 years had to accomplish a picture-naming task. Both groups used more pointing than iconic gestures at the age of 2.…”