The Development of Pointing Gestures in Children
Abstract
Pointing is seen as the cornerstone of human communication, and many researches have provided evidences for the fact that human infant start to point before they can speak. However, these studies have often focused on the motivation and function behind their pointing behaviors. This study investigated children pointing gesture development by administering a referential communication task. Our findings showed that children from five to six do much better than other children as they can successfully use manual pointing to complete the task on the basis of understanding the task requirements.References
[1] Butterworth, G. (2003). Pointing is the royal road to language for babies. In Kita, S. (Ed.), Pointing: Where language, culture, and cognition meet. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 9-33.
[2] Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M., & Liszkowski, U. (2007). A new look at infant pointing. Child Development, 78, 705–722.
[3] Begus, K. & Southgate, V. (2012). Infant pointing serves an interrogative function. Developmental Science, 15(5), 611–617.
[4] Lucca, K., Wilbourn, M. P. (2019). The what and the how: Information-seeking pointing gestures facilitate learning labels and functions. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 178, 417-436.
[5] Matthews, D., Behne, T., Lieven, E., Tomasello, M. (2012). Origins of the human pointing gesture: A training study. Developmental Science, 15, 8l7-829.
[6] Salomo, D., Liszkowski, U. (2013). Sociocultural settings influence the emergence of prelinguistic deictic gestures. Child Development, 84, 1296-1307.
[7] Cooperrider, K., Slotta, J., Núñez, R. (2018). The Preference for Pointing With the Hand Is Not Universal. Cognitive Science, 42(4), 1375-1390.
Authors contributing to this journal agree to publish their articles under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International License, allowing third parties to share their work (copy, distribute, transmit) and to adapt it, under the condition that the authors are given credit, that the work is not used for commercial purposes, and that in the event of reuse or distribution, the terms of this license are made clear. With this license, the authors hold the copyright without restrictions and are allowed to retain publishing rights without restrictions as long as this journal is the original publisher of the articles.
