literature review
Research Report
Gesture Paves the Way for
Language Development
Jana M. Iverson1 and Susan Goldin-Meadow2
1
University of Pittsburgh and
2
University of Chicago
ABSTRACTIn development, children often use gesture to
communicate before they use words. The question is
whether these gestures merely precede language develop-
ment or are fundamentally tied to it. We examined 10
children making the transition from single words to two-
word combinations and found that gesture had a tight
relation to the childrens lexical and syntactic develop-
ment. First, a great many of the lexical items that each
child produced initially in gesture later moved to that
childs verbal lexicon. Second, children who were first to
produce gesture-plus-word combinations conveying two
elements in a proposition (point at bird and say nap)
were also first to produce two-word combinations (bird
nap). Changes in gesture thus not only predate but also
predict changes in language, suggesting that early gesture
may be paving the way for future developments in lan-
guage.
Young children communicate using gestures before they are
able to speak. Children typically produce their first gestures
between 9 and 12 months, usually pointing to indicate objects in
the environment (Bates, 1976; Bates, Benigni, Bretherton,
Camaioni, & Volterra, 1979). Even after children begin to talk,
they continue to produce gestures in combination with words
(e.g., pointing at cup while saying cup; e.g., Greenfield &
Smith, 1976), and these gesture-plus-word combinations gen-
erally precede production of two-word combinations. Gesture
development thus predates language development. The ques-
tion we address here is whether gesture is fundamentally tied to
language development.
The gestures that children produce early in language devel-
opment provide a way for them to communicate information that
they cannot yet express verbally. For example, pointing gestures
(e.g., point at cup) offer children a technique for referring to
objects before they have words for those objects. Moreover,
gesture-plus-word combinations offer children a technique for
communicating two pieces of information within a single
utterance before they can produce two-word utterances (e.g.,
point at cup while saying mine; Butcher & Goldin-Meadow,
2000; Capirci, Iverson, Pizzuto, & Volterra, 1996; Goldin-
Meadow & Butcher, 2003). The fact that gesture allows children
to communicate meanings that they may have difficulty ex-
pressing verbally raises the possibility that gesture serves a
facilitating function for language learning. If so, changes in
gesture should not only predate but also predict changes in
language.
We tested this hypothesis by examining gesture production in
relation to lexical and syntactic development in the early stages
of language development. We asked (a) whether childrens use
of gesture to refer to specific objects is related to the emergence
of verbal labels for those objects and (b) whether childrens
production of gesture-plus-word combinations is related to the
emergence of two-word utterances.
METHOD
Participants
Ten typically developing children (5 males, 5 females) partic-
ipated; all were from middle- to upper-middle-class monolin-
gual English-speaking families. The children were followed
longitudinally between the ages of 10 and 24 months. We focus
here on sessions between the onset of one-word speech (range:
1014 months) and the emergence of two-word combinations
(range: 1723 months). On average, each child was observed
8 times (range: 512).
Procedure
The children were videotaped monthly for approximately 30
min. The taping took place in the home, during play with a
primary caregiver and during a snack or mealtime. Toys were
provided by the experimenter, but the children were also free to
play with their own toys.
Coding
We focused on gestures and speech used communicatively. The
child had to make an effort to direct the listeners attention (e.g.,
Address correspondence to Jana M. Iverson, Department of Psy-
chology, University of Pittsburgh, 3415 Sennott Square, 210 S.
Bouquet St., Pittsburgh, PA 15260; e-mail: [emailprotected]
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 16Number 5 367Copyright r 2005 American Psychological Society
through eye gaze, vocalization, postural shift) for a behavior to be
considered communicative. A communicative behavior could
be gesture on its own, speech on its own, or gesture and speech
produced together.
Coding Gesture
Two additional criteria were used to ensure that a gesture was
functioning as a communicative symbol (see Butcher, Mylander,
& Goldin-Meadow, 1991; Goldin-Meadow & Mylander, 1984):
First, the gesture could not be a direct manipulation of some
relevant person or object (i.e., it had to be empty-handed;
Petitto, 1988). All acts performed on objects were excluded,
except for instances in which a child held up an object to bring
it to another persons attention, an act that serves the same
function as pointing. Second, the gesture could not be a ritual
act (e.g., blowing a kiss to someone) or game (e.g., patty-cake).
Each gesture was classified into one of three categories: deic-
tic gesture, conventional gesture, or ritualized reach. Deictic
gestures indicate referents in the immediate environment.
Children produced three types of deictic gestures: (a) showing,
holding up an object in the listeners potential line of sight; (b)
index point, extending the index finger toward a referent; and (c)
palm point, extending a flat hand toward a referent. The referent
of a deictic gesture was assumed to be the object indicated (or
held up) by the hand.
1
Conventional gestures have a form and
meaning that are either culturally defined (e.g., nodding the
head yes) or specified in the context of particular caregiver-
child interactions (e.g., smoothing the hands over the hair to
mean pretty). Ritualized reaches are arm extensions toward an
object, usually accompanied by repeated opening and closing of
the palm.
Coding Speech
We coded all communicative, meaningful vocalizations; these
consisted of either English words (e.g., dog, hot, walking)
or patterns of speech sounds consistently used to refer to a
specific object or event (e.g., [ba] for bottle).
Coding the Relation Between Gesture and Speech
All instances in which a gesture was produced co-temporally
with speech were classified as gesture-plus-word combinations
and divided into two categories based on the relation between
the information conveyed in the two modalities. One category
included gestures that complemented speech by singling out the
referent indicated by the accompanying word (e.g., pointing to
flowers while saying flowers to indicate flowers on the table).
The second category included gestures that supplemented
speech by providing a different but related piece of information
about the referent (e.g., pointing to a picture of a bird while
saying nap to indicate that the bird in the picture is sleeping).
Reliability
Reliability between two independent coders was assessed for
10% of the 80 sessions. Agreement between coders was 93% (N
5 639) for isolating gestures and 100% (N 5 52) for classifying
gesture-plus-word combinations as complementary or supple-
mentary. Cohens kappa statistics for these coding decisions
were .92 and 1.0, respectively. Agreement was 100% (N 5 242)
for assigning meanings to gestures and 91% (N 5 463) for
assigning meanings to words.
RESULTS
Object Reference in Gesture and Early Lexical
Development
Do the early gestures that a child produces have any relation to
the words that the child subsequently utters? For these analy-
ses, we identified all instances in which children referred to an
object
2
and classified them into three categories: speech only
(i.e., using only a word to refer to an object), gesture only (i.e.,
using only a gesture to refer to an object), or speech and gesture
(i.e., using both a word and a gesture, not necessarily at the
same time, to refer to an object). Intercoder reliability for this
decision was 92% (N 5 119), k 5 .85. Because we were in-
terested in examining developmental change in the number of
different items in childrens verbal and gestural repertoires, this
analysis was based on types (a traditional measure of vocabu-
lary growth) within a session. For example, if a child only
pointed at a ball (one or more times) during the session, ball was
counted as one type in the gesture-only category. If the child
only said ball (one or more times) during the session, ball was
counted as one type in the speech-only category. If a child
produced the word ball and also pointed at a ball in the same
session (whether simultaneously or at different times), we
counted ball as one type in the speech-and-gesture category. We
then calculated the proportion of items (summed across ses-
sions) that each child produced in each of the three categories.
The children relied extensively on gesture to refer to objects:
Approximately half of each childs object references across
sessions occurred in gesture only (M 5 .50, SD 5 .16), with
another quarter occurring in both speech and gesture (M 5 .22,
SD 5 .06). Only a fourth of the object references that each child
produced occurred in speech only (M 5 .28, SD 5 .18). But
gesture did become less important over time. At the initial
1
It is possible that, at times, children used deictic gestures to refer to events
rather than objects (e.g., cat sleeping rather than cat). Our results, however,
do not support this possibility. When points were assumed to refer to objects,
childrens pointing gestures predicted subsequent entries in their spoken vo-
cabularies, and onset of childrens supplementary gesture-plus-word combina-
tions predicted onset of two-word utterances; our results thus provide indirect
support for coding points as references to objects. If we misattributed the ref-
erents of pointing gestures, this would only have weakened our results and re-
duced the likelihood that they would support the gesture-facilitation hypothesis.
2
Only nouns and deictic gestures were included in the lexical analyses.
Pronouns were infrequent and thus omitted; in analyses including pronouns, the
results were unchanged.
368 Volume 16Number 5
Gesture and Language Development
session, 9 of the 10 children produced a majority of object
references in gesture only, whereas none did at the final session,
w2(1) 5 12.93, p < .001. Gesture thus appears to provide a way for children to refer to objects at a time when they are not producing words for those objects. If gesture serves a facilitating function in lexical de- velopment, one might expect an individual lexical item to enter a childs repertoire first in gesture and then, over time, transfer to speech. To explore this possibility, we identified lexical items that a child used in multiple sessions and classified them into four categories 3 according to whether they (a) appeared initially in speech and remained in speech, (b) appeared initially in gesture and remained in gesture, (c) appeared initially in speech and transferred or spread to gesture, or (d) appeared initially in gesture and transferred or spread to speech. Items that appeared initially in both speech and gesture were ex- cluded from this analysis. Table 1 presents the mean proportion of items that fell into each category. Modality had a clear impact on lexical devel- opment. Significantly more items were produced initially in gesture than in speech, F(1, 9) 5 12.33, p < .01, Z2 5 .578. Moreover, a significant proportion of the items either switched or spread from one modality to the other (as opposed to staying in one modality), F(1, 9) 5 8.05, p < .03, Z2 5 .472. However, there was a significant interaction between the two factors, F(1, 9) 5 20.37, p < .002, Z2 5 .694: Items were more likely to move from gesture to speech than from speech to gesture ( p < .001, Newman-Keuls). On average, children produced a gesture for a particular object 3.0 months (SD 5 0.54, range: 2.3 to 3.9 months) before they produced the word for that object. Thus, the results are consistent with the gestural-facilitation hypothesis, as we were able to predict a large proportion of the lexical items that eventually appeared in a childs verbal repertoire from that childs earlier gestures. Because the relation between a deictic gesture and its referent is more transparent than the arbitrary relation between most words and their referents, gesture can provide children with a temporary way to communicate about objects, allowing them to circumvent difficulties related to producing speech (Acredolo & Goodwyn, 1988; Werner & Kaplan, 1963). Gesture may thus serve as a transitional device in early lexical development. Gesture-Plus-Word Combinations and the Transition to Two-Word Speech All 10 children combined single gestures with single words and did so several months before producing two-word utterances. Moreover, all 10 children produced both supplementary (point at bird while saying nap) and complementary (point at bird while saying bird) gesture-plus-word combinations before the onset of two-word utterances (bird nap). The mean interval between the onset of supplementary gesture-plus-word combi- nations and onset of two-word utterances was 2.3 months (SD 5 1.66); the corresponding interval between the onset of com- plementary gesture-plus-word combinations and the onset of two-word combinations was 4.7 months (SD 5 2.2). 4 Note that like two-word combinations, supplementary ges- ture-plus-word combinations communicate two semantic ele- ments within a single communicative act. If gesture facilitates the emergence of early speech combinations, one might expect children who produce supplementary gesture-plus-word com- binations to be the first to make the transition to two-word speech. And indeed, we found a significant correlation between age of onset of supplementary gesture-plus-word combinations
and age of onset of two-word combinations (Spearman rs 5 .94,
p < .001, two-tailed; see Fig. 1). Unlike supplementary gesture-plus-word combinations, com- plementary combinations convey a single semantic element. One therefore would not expect the onset of this type of gesture-plus-word combination to predict the onset of two- word utterances, and, indeed, it did not. The correlation be- tween age of onset of complementary gesture-plus-word com- binations and age of onset of two-word combinations was low and not reliable (Spearman rs 5 .24, n.s.; see Fig. 1). Thus, it is the ability to combine two different semantic elements within a single communicative actnot simply the ability to produce gesture and speech togetherthat predicts the onset of two- word speech. DISCUSSION We have found that gesture both precedes and is tightly related to language development. At the lexical level, items found in- itially in childrens gestural repertoires subsequently appeared in their verbal lexicons. At the sentence level, the onset of gesture-plus-word combinations conveying two elements of a TABLE 1 Categorization of Lexical Items According to Modality of First Appearance and Developmental Trajectory Developmental trajectory of the item Modality in which the item first appeared Speech Gesture Remained in one modality .16 (.13) .25 (.13) Switched or spread to the other modality .09 (.06) .50 (.12) Note. The numbers shown are mean proportions (with standard deviations in parentheses). Only lexical items that appeared in multiple observation sessions were included in this analysis. 3 Lexical items appearing in multiple sessions accounted for .41 (range: .29 .49) of each childs repertoire. 4 Age of onset for complementary, supplementary, and two-word combinations was defined as the childs age at the session in which he or she first produced at least two instances of the respective kind of combination. Volume 16Number 5 369 Jana M. Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow proposition predicted with great precision the onset of two-word combinations. Our findings are thus consistent with the hy- pothesis that gesture plays a facilitating role in early language development. What might gesture be doing to facilitate language learning? One possibility is that gesture serves as a signal to the childs communicative partner that the child is ready for a particular kind of verbal input. Consider a child who points at his or her fathers hat while saying dada. The childs caregiver might respond by saying, Yes, thats daddys hat, in effect trans- lating the childs gesture-plus-word combination into a two-
word utterance and providing the child with timely verbal input.
Indeed, adults have been found to alter their input to older
children on the basis of the gestures that the children produce
(Goldin-Meadow & Singer, 2003), providing them with in-
struction that leads to learning (Singer & Goldin-Meadow,
2005).
Gesture may also play a role in language learning by affecting
the learners themselves. Although gesture and speech form a
single integrated system, gesture exploits different representa-
tional resources than does speech (McNeill, 1992). Meanings
that lend themselves to visuospatial representation may be
easier to express in gesture than in speech. Indeed, children on
the cusp of mastering a task often produce strategies for solving
the task in gesture before producing them in speech (Church &
Goldin-Meadow, 1986; Perry, Church, & Goldin-Meadow, 1988).
In addition to relying on a different representational format,
gesture lessens demands on memory. Pointing at an object is
likely to put less strain on memory than producing a word for
that object. Moreover, gesturing while speaking has been found
to save speakers cognitive effort (Goldin-Meadow, Nusbaum,
Kelly, & Wagner, 2001; Wagner, Nusbaum, & Goldin-Meadow,
2004); consequently, it may be cognitively less demanding to
express a proposition in a gesture-plus-word combination than
in two words.
Gesture may thus provide a way for new meanings to enter
childrens communicative repertoires. It may also give children
a means for practicing these new meanings, laying the foun-
dation for their eventual appearance in speech. There is, in fact,
evidence that the act of gesturing can itself promote learning
(Wagner & Goldin-Meadow, 2004).
In sum, our findings underscore the tight link between gesture
and speech, even in children at the earliest stages of language
learning. At minimum, gesture is a harbinger of change in the
childs developing language system, as it is in other cognitive
systems later in development (Goldin-Meadow, 2003). Gesture
may even pave the way for future developments in language.
AcknowledgmentsThis research was supported by grants
from the National Institute of Child Health and Human De-
velopment (Grant R01 HD 41677 to J.M.I. and Grant P01 HD
40605 to S.G.-M.) and by a grant from the March of Dimes
Foundation to S.G.-M.
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nations and age of onset of two-word combinations (left) and between age of onset of complementary gesture-
plus-word combinations and age of onset of two-word combinations (right).
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Butcher, C., Mylander, C., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (1991). Displaced
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(RECEIVED 4/30/04; REVISION ACCEPTED 8/26/04)
Volume 16Number 5 371
Jana M. Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow Brief article
Gesture is at the cutting edge of early language
development
Seyda Ozcalskan*, Susan Goldin-Meadow
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 5848 S. University Avenue, Green 317,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Received 26 November 2004; accepted 14 January 2005
Abstract
Children who produce one word at a time often use gesture to supplement their speech,
turning a single word into an utterance that conveys a sentence-like meaning (eatCpoint at
cookie). Interestingly, the age at which children first produce supplementary gesturespeech
combinations of this sort reliably predicts the age at which they first produce two-word
utterances. Gesture thus serves as a signal that a child will soon be ready to begin producing
multi-word sentences. The question is what happens next. Gesture could continue to expand a
childs communicative repertoire over development, combining with words to convey
increasingly complex ideas. Alternatively, after serving as an opening wedge into language,
gesture could cease its role as a forerunner of linguistic change. We addressed this question in a
sample of 40 typically developing children, each observed at 14, 18, and 22 months. The
number of supplementary gesturespeech combinations the children produced increased
significantly from 14 to 22 months. More importantly, the types of supplementary combinations
the children produced changed over time and presaged changes in their speech. Children
produced three distinct constructions across the two modalities several months before these
same constructions appeared entirely within speech. Gesture thus continues to be at the cutting
edge of early language development, providing stepping-stones to increasingly complex
linguistic constructions.
q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Gesture; Two-word speech; Argument structure; Gesturespeech relation
Cognition 96 (2005) B101B113
www.elsevier.com/locate/COGNIT
0022-2860/$ – see front matter q 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2005.01.001
* Corresponding author. Tel.: C1 773 834 1447; fax: C1 773 834 5261.
E-mail address: [emailprotected] (S. Ozcalskan).
http://www.elsevier.com/locate/COGNIT
S. Ozcalskan, S. Goldin-Meadow / Cognition 96 (2005) B101B113B102
1. Gestures role in early language-learning
At a certain stage in the process of learning language, children produce one word at a
time. They have words that refer to objects and people and words that refer to actions and
properties in their productive vocabularies (Nelson, 1973). However, they do not combine
these words into sentence-like strings.
Interestingly, at the earliest stages of language learning, children also fail to combine
their words with gesture. They use deictic gestures to point out objects, people, and
places in the world, and iconic gestures to convey relational information as early as 10
months (Acredolo & Goodwyn, 1985, 1989; Bates, 1976; Bates, Benigni, Bretherton,
Camaioni & Volterra, 1979; Greenfield & Smith, 1976; Iverson, Capirci, & Caselli,
1994). However, they do not combine these gestures with wordsdespite the fact that,
during this same period, they are able to combine gestures with meaningless
vocalizations (e.g. grunts, exclamations; Butcher & Goldin-Meadow, 2000). Producing
meaningful words and gestures in a single combination thus appears to be a significant
developmental step.
Children take the developmental step that allows them to combine words with
gestures several months before they take the step that enables them to combine words
with other words (Capirci, Iverson, Pizzuto, & Volterra, 1996; Goldin-Meadow &
Butcher, 2003; Greenfield & Smith, 1976). For example, before a child produces two-
word utterances, the child is able to point at a cup while saying the word cup or,
more interestingly, point at a cup while saying the word mommy. Note that this
second type of gesturespeech combination provides children with a technique for
conveying sentence-like information before they are able to convey that same
information in words alone (mommy cup). Gesturespeech combinations of both
types precede the onset of two-word utterances. The question we address in this paper
is what role these gesturespeech combinations play in the development of childrens
first sentences.
There is, in fact, evidence that childrens gesturespeech combinations are related
to their first two-word utterances. The age at which children first produce gesture
speech combinations conveying sentence-like information (e.g. mommyCpoint at
cup) is highly correlated with the age at which they begin to produce their first two-
word utterances (Goldin-Meadow & Butcher, 2003; Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, in
press). Importantly, the onset of combinations in which gesture is redundant
with speech (e.g. mommyCpoint at mommy) does not predict the onset of
two-word utterances. It is the relation between gesture and speech, and not the
presence of gesture per se, that predicts when children will first produce multi-word
combinations.
A childs ability to convey sentence-like meanings across gesture and speech is
thus a signal that the child will soon be able to convey these meanings entirely within
speech. But if there is truly a tight link between early gesturespeech combinations
and later language development, we ought to be able to see precursors of particular
sentence constructions in childrens early gesturespeech combinations.
Children use deictic gestures to convey object information (e.g. point at mommy to
refer to mommy) and iconic gestures to convey predicate information (e.g. fist pounding in
S. Ozcalskan, S. Goldin-Meadow / Cognition 96 (2005) B101B113 B103
the air to refer to the act of hitting).
1
These gestures could be added to words to build more
complex meanings. For example, a child could produce a point at a peg along with the
word mommy to request mommy to act on the peg, thus conveying two arguments of a
simple proposition (the agent mommy in speech, and the patient peg in gesture). Or, the
child could produce an iconic hit gesture along with the word mommy to make the same
request, this time conveying the predicate and argument of the proposition (the action hit
in gesture, and the agent mommy in speech). If gesturespeech combinations are
precursors to linguistic constructions, we might expect children to produce argumentC
argument and predicateCargument combinations across gesture and speech before they
produce these combinations within speech (mommy peg, mommy hit).
More convincing still, children ought to be able to take the next step toward sentence
constructioncomplex constructions containing two predicatesin gesturespeech
combinations before taking this step in speech on its own. For example, a child who
produces an iconic hit gesture along with the sentence help me has, in effect, produced a
two-predicate construction, the help predicate in speech and the hit predicate in gesture.
Do children produce predicateCpredicate constructions in gesturespeech combinations
before they produce them entirely in speech (help me hit)? Does gesture continue to
predict the childs next linguistic steps?
To examine the role that gesturespeech combinations play in early language learning,
we observed 40 children as they progressed from one-word to multi-word speech. Our
question was whether the types of gesturespeech combinations that the children produced
presage oncoming changes in their speech and thus serve as a forerunner of linguistic
advances.
2. Method
2.1. Sample and data collection
Forty children (21 girls, 19 boys) were videotaped in their homes at 14, 18, and 22
months while interacting with their primary caregivers. The childrens families were
representative of the population in the greater Chicago area in terms of ethnic composition
and income distribution (see Table 1), and children were being raised as monolingual
English speakers. Each session lasted 90 minutes, and caregivers were asked to interact
with their children as they normally would and ignore the experimenter. Sessions typically
1
We followed Goldin-Meadow and Mylander (1984) in relying on gesture form (which, in our data, was
primarily action-based and, only occasionally, attribute-based) in assigning meaning to iconic gestures. In most
instances, the decision was bolstered by context. Take, for example, the hit gesture mentioned in the text. The
child and the mother were playing with a toy containing pegs of different colors and a plastic hammer. Initially,
the child was hammering the pegs while mother told him which pegs to hammer (e.g. hammer the blue one,
hammer the purple one). Later, the child handed the plastic hammer to mother and said you while producing
an iconic hit gesture. The child seemed to be using his iconic gesture to tell his mother to hit the peg and was thus
conveying an action meaning with his gesture.
Table 1
The sample of children classified according to ethnicity and family income
Family income Parents ethnicity
African-
American
Asian Caucasian Hispanic Mixed Total
Less than $15,000 1 0 1 0 0 2
$15,000$34,999 2 1 2 2 1 8
$35,000$49,999 2 0 3 0 1 6
$50,000$74,999 2 1 6 0 0 9
$75,000$99,999 1 0 5 1 0 7
$100,000 or more 0 0 7 0 1 8
Total 8 2 24 3 3 40
Mixed, two or more ethnic groups.
S. Ozcalskan, S. Goldin-Meadow / Cognition 96 (2005) B101B113B104
involved free play with toys, book reading with the caregiver, and a meal or snack time,
but also varied depending on the preferences of the caregiver.
2.2. Procedure for data analysis
All meaningful sounds and communicative gestures were transcribed. Hand move-
ments were considered communicative gestures if they were used to convey information to
a listener and did not involve direct manipulation of objects (e.g. banging a peg) or a
ritualized game (e.g. itsy-bitsy spider). Sounds were
