Do pointing gestures by infants provoke comments from adults?
Abstract
In the field of developmental psychology, there is speculation that pointing gestures by infants are good precursors of infant language acquisition, and some researchers have found correlations between these pointing gestures and some indices of language acquisition. Infants' pointing gestures are presumably related to language acquisition because they provoke verbal responses from adults. To test this, seven boys and six girls were observed during free play time in a nursery classroom, and post-pointing and matched-control data were collected. Comparison between these data confirmed that the nursery staff spoke to infants at a significantly earlier stage in post-pointing sequences, compared with control sequences, indicating that pointing gestures elicit verbal responses from adult caregivers.
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Infants' points have been found to elicit more verbal labeling responses from adults.
“More specifically, infants' points have been found to elicit more verbal labeling responses from adults (Kishimoto et al., 2007; Wu & Gros‐Louis, 2015).”
From The role of dyadic combinations of infants' behaviors and caregivers' verbal and multimodal responses in predicting vocabulary outcomes (2025) · cites this paper as Kishimoto et al., 2007
Previous studies found that infants' points tend to elicit more labeling responses from caregivers.
“In support of the latter hypothesis, previous studies found that infants' points tend to elicit more labeling responses from caregivers (Kishimoto et al., 2007; Wu & Gros‐Louis, 2015).”
From The role of dyadic combinations of infants' behaviors and caregivers' verbal and multimodal responses in predicting vocabulary outcomes (2025) · cites this paper as Kishimoto et al., 2007
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- Authors
- Kishimoto, T., Shizawa, Y., Yasuda, J., Hinobayashi, T., & Minami, T.
- Affiliations
- The University of Osaka (JP)
- Corresponding author
- Kishimoto, Takeshi
- ORCID
- Yasuda, Jun
- Venue
- Infant Behavior and Development
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2007-12
- Volume
- 30
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 562-567
- ISSN
- 0163-6383 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1968030752
- Cited by
- 78
- References
- 24
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 1 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 5 · 2015: 5 · 2014: 7 · 2013: 5 · 2012: 5
- FWCI
- 2.11
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Infant Behavior and Development (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Language Development and Disorders
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Hearing Impairment and Communication
- Keywords
- language acquisition, caregiver-infant interaction, nursery staff, free play
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Cognition, Communication, Female, Gestures, Humans, Infant, Language Development, Male, Mother-Child Relations, Play and Playthings, Verbal Learning
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