Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 334

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 66 of the 66 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

A Prelinguistic Gestural Universal of Human Communication

Open access
Liszkowski, Ulf, Brown, Penny, Callaghan, Tara, Takada, Akira, de Vos, Conny·2012·Cognitive Science

Abstract

Several cognitive accounts of human communication argue for a language‐independent, prelinguistic basis of human communication and language. The current study provides evidence for the universality of a prelinguistic gestural basis for human communication. We used a standardized, semi‐natural elicitation procedure in seven very different cultures around the world to test for the existence of preverbal pointing in infants and their caregivers. Results were that by 10–14 months of age, infants and their caregivers pointed in all cultures in the same basic situation with similar frequencies and the same proto‐typical morphology of the extended index finger. Infants’ pointing was best predicted by age and caregiver pointing, but not by cultural group. Further analyses revealed a strong relation between the temporal unfolding of caregivers’ and infants’ pointing events, uncovering a structure of early prelinguistic gestural conversation. Findings support the existence of a gestural, language‐independent universal of human communication that forms a culturally shared, prelinguistic basis for diversified linguistic communication.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01228.x

Cites

66 of 66 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 66 references

Cited by

See all 334

Metadata

Authors
Liszkowski, U., Brown, P., Callaghan, T., Takada, A., & de Vos, C.
Venue
Cognitive Science
Publisher
Wiley
Published
2012-02-03
Volume
36
Issue
4
Pages
698-713
ISSN
  • 0364-0213 (ISSN-L)
  • 1551-6709
OpenAlex
W2117164941
Cited by
334
References
66
FWCI
263.28
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: A Prelinguistic Gestural Universal of Human Communication. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01228.x
The paper
Liszkowski, U., Brown, P., Callaghan, T., Takada, A., & de Vos, C. (2012). A Prelinguistic Gestural Universal of Human Communication. Cognitive Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01228.x

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.