As humans we love to communicate through our expression, body language and even gesturing. Gestures become a vital and key part of communication. It is the way people express themselves or even when trying to get their point across. Gesturing allows one to explain complex topics that otherwise with words would be hard to follow. In all it is a way one can communicate. As a child is developing, they turn to gesturing as a form of language before they can even say their first words. They would use their index finger and point to an object or the subject they are referring to and help make sense of what they are trying to communicate. A child might also use these gestures to express how they feel and just get their point across. Usually, a child's first form of communication is babbling which starts around 6-9 months and by 12 months they start to say their first words. At last, around 18 months to 2 years of age they can say words and join them together to form sentences. But with someone that experiences delayed speech this is furthered down into their development, making it harder to communicate as they grow. Which makes researchers think of the comprehend words and have understanding. Hence why gestures come in and play such a key role.
Dr. Wakefield and her colleague Natalia did a study on how gesturing to help children who speak Polish and to test if their comprehend is due to words being said or the gesture has a part in it as well. What they found is that children tend to focus on their hands as one is talking. In their study they had Polish speaking children, but polish was their second language, watch person tell them a story in Polish while gesturing and one story in Polish without gesturing. And what was concluded was that the story being told with gestures was comprehended better than the story without gestures. The second time around they presented a different Polish story with incorrect gestures and no gestures. And they concluded that the kids who had the gesture comprehended the story incorrectly. Which comes down to the fact that the children do rely on gestures to get some context of the story. But if this were to to be done in adults, it is said that adults don’t attend to gestures as much as they pay attention to language being spoken.
Like Dr. Wakefild, Chiara Suttora did a study on if gesturing can help children who are late in language development. She wanted to study if gesturing/ gesturing with words could build comprehension and perhaps sentence production in late talkers. She did this with children that were born full-term and with children born low risk preterm. What she found was that not enough studies had been done on this topic. But also, children who were born pre-term were more prone to having language delays than a child who was born full term. And that children in their second year of life used gestures or the combination with gestures and words had higher levels of grammar and lingual abilities than those who didn’t use gestures at all. But also, what I found interesting was that the reason why one child may be a late talker could be due to many factors such as the certain child's environment and people they interact with. The environment is a big factor when looking into a child's life and how it influences a child's development. When studying a topic such as gestures and communication in children there are many factors that influence one another.
What would be interesting to see is if there would be a study that could combine these two in which they studied gestures and communication in pre-term and full term born children that are bilingual. Having more factors could open more doors for new findings.
References:
Zielinski, Natalia, and Elizabeth M Wakefield. “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding through a Visual Attention Mechanism.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 19 July 2021, escholarship.org/uc/item/63r5d3qq.
Suttora, Chiara, et al. “Integrating Gestures and Words to Communicate in Full-Term and Low-Risk Preterm Late Talkers.” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 25 Mar. 2022, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8997750/.
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