Integrating language and gesture in infancy.

Abstract

Whether language/gesture correlations inearly language development can be explained by parallel-ism or comprehension mediation was examined. Study 1, parental report data for 95 l-year-olds, suggested that word comprehension a d production are dissociated in this age range and that the comprehension a d production factors map onto distinct aspects of gesture. Study 2 tested 41 13-15-month-olds ina task in which the modeled gesture was accompanied bysupportive, contradictory, or neutral narratives. Results showed that infants can use adult speech as an aid in reproduction of modeled gestures (comprehension mediation). However, there is still additional variance in gestural production that correlates with expressive vocabulary when comprehension-related variance is re-moved. Thus, comprehension mediation and parallelism both appear to be operating. Before they are 18 months old, most children discover the idea that things have names (i.e., that words can be used to recognize, request, label, categorize and represent objects in the world). This discovery is preceded by evidence for word com-prehension and is either preceded or accompanied by the use of conventional gestural schemes in communication or in play with objects, or in both. Piaget (1962) and Werner and Kaplan (1963) have argued that this temporal synchrony isno accident. Their approach is based on the idea of parallelism (i.e., that linguistic and gestural schemes for objects are related in early development because they both depend on a common underly-ing symbolic function). Thus, word comprehension, word pro-duction, and symbolic play are clear, public manifestations of a much more general cognitive shift from sensorimotor p ocess-ing to the use of symbols in many aspects of thinking, problem solving, and communication (for reviews ee Bates, Bretherton,

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