When gesture-speech combinations do and do not index linguistic change

Abstract

At the one-word stage children use gesture to supplement their speech (‘eat’+point at cookie), and the onset of such supplementary gesture-speech combinations predicts the onset of two-word speech (‘eat cookie’). Gesture thus signals a child's readiness to produce two-word constructions. The question we ask here is what happens when the child begins to flesh out these early skeletal two-word constructions with additional arguments. One possibility is that gesture continues to be a forerunner of linguistic change as children flesh out their skeletal constructions by adding arguments. Alternatively, after serving as an opening wedge into language, gesture could cease its role as a forerunner of linguistic change. Our analysis of 40 children – from 14 to 34 months – showed that children relied on gesture to produce the first instance of a variety of constructions. However, once each construction was established in their repertoire, the children did not use gesture to flesh out the construction. Gesture thus acts as a harbinger of linguistic steps only when those steps involve new constructions, not when the steps merely flesh out existing constructions.

Acknowledgements

We thank Kristi Schonwald and Jason Voigt for administrative and technical support, and Karyn Brasky, Laura Chang, Elaine Croft, Kristin Duboc, Becky Free, Jennifer Griffin, Sarah Gripshover, Kelsey Harden, Lauren King, Carrie Meanwell, Erica Mellum, Molly Nikolas, Jana Oberholtzer, Lillia Rissman, Becky Seibel, Laura Scheidman, Meredith Simone, Calla Trofatter, and Kevin Uttich for help in data collection and transcription. We also thank Sotaro Kita and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. The research was supported by a P01 HD40605 grant to S. Goldin-Meadow.

Notes

¹Children occasionally produced a fourth type of gesture, the beat gesture. Beat gestures are formless hand movements that convey no semantic information but move in rhythmic relationship with speech to highlight aspects of discourse structure (e.g., flicking the hand or the fingers up and down or back and forth; McNeill, 1992). The incidence of beat gestures was extremely rare in the data; this category was therefore excluded from the analyses.