The relationship between infant pointing and language development: A meta-analytic review

In Bilinguals' Hands: Identification of Bilingual, Preverbal Infants at Risk for Language Delay

“…The presented values of quality criteria for screening tools in this study as well as in the study with the monolingual sample ( 5 ) can only serve as orientation. Nevertheless, these orientating values with, for example good accuracies between 74 and 85%, the predictive value of pointing gestures found in many studies [for meta-analysis see ( 1 , 6 )], and the language and cultural universal occurrence of index-finger pointing ( 25 – 27 , 29 ) are encouraging to further investigate the use of index-finger pointing as an early indicator of LD in a population-based study with children between 10 and 12 months during pediatric service. This would be especially important for children growing up with two or more languages since the identification of bilingual children with LD or even DLD is particularly challenging ( 23 , 24 ).…”

“…For example, Kuhn et al ( 2 ) revealed with an epidemiological sample of over 1,000 infants studied within a prospective longitudinal study, that individual differences in communicative gestures at 15 months predict language skills at 2 and 3 years of age. Similarly, a recent meta-analysis by Kirk et al ( 6 ) found a predictive function of early pointing for later language abilities, but with a considerably smaller effect size compared to Colonnesi et al's meta-analysis ( 1 ). Moreover, differences in the gestures between children with typical language development and children with language delay (LD) were identified ( 5 , 7 – 10 ).…”

“…While only 27% of the Mayan infants produced index-finger points, 72% of the Dutch and 88% of the Chinese infants did. In their recent meta-analysis, Kirk et al ( 6 ) criticized that “none of the studies included samples of bilingual infants” (p. 2). Apart from the recently published study by Cameron-Faulkner et al ( 29 ) no data on pointing behavior in bilingual infants and its predictive value for later language competencies is currently available.…”

“…However, insights about the very early use of pointing gestures—around 12 months of age—and their predictive value for later language competencies are still missing for bilingual children [c.f. ( 6 )].…”

Spanish‐speaking caregivers’ use of referential labels with toddlers is a better predictor of later vocabulary than their use of referential gestures

“…At earlier ages more children are in an early pre-linguistic stage, and thus may benefit more from the support for learning provided by caregivers' use of referential gestures. Children who produce more gestures early in life have been found to have stronger vocabulary later on (e.g., Colonnesi et al, 2010;Kirk et al, 2022). Caregivers' gestures may be particularly supportive of children's prelinguistic gestures and short-term language outcomes (Rowe & Leech, 2019), an effect that is less evident as children become more linguistically advanced.…”