Through this first half of the semester I had the ability to listen to Dr.Elizabeth Wakefield speech titled "Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism", centering around the effect that hand gestures have on children comprehension and learning ability, specially when they are learning in their weaker language. This research highlighted how communication and the comprehension around communication isn't just surrounded by words, but is also about the visual information that accompanies it. This made me more interested in the topic of how hand gesturing can be more than just a way of language compression in children, but also be a form of language communication prior to their ability to vocally communicate.
Prior to children's ability to produce spoken language, they fully rely on non-verbal behaviors such as reaching, showing objects, and pointing to communicate their needs and interests with other individuals. In a study titled "The emergence of pointing as a communicative gesture: Age-related differences in infants’ non-social and social use of the index finger" highlights especially the idea of how children use their index figure changes over time. When children are younger, they often use hand gestures for self-directed exploration and lack the ability to use hand gestures as communication. As they age they start to understand how hand gestures can bring other people attention towards something they are interested in. This phenomenon is called joint attention, this is the ability for a child and a caregiver to focus on the same object or event through non verbal communication. Joint attention is one of the most critical foundations for language learning in infants since it allows for the understanding of social interactions. This transition between self-directed hand movements to intentional and social pointing reflects a social development of non-verbal language in children.
Similarly, in the study titled "The relationship between infant pointing and language development: A meta-analytic review" the authors discovered the connection between early pointing in infants and their increased vocabulary growth later in life. This is facilitated by the idea of how hand gestures such as pointing help establish that same phenomenon of joint attention between an infant and their caregiver. In this case when a child points at something their caregiver often responds by labeling or describing the object, an example would be if a child points at a snack of interest, the caregiver may say "do you want [snack name]", and allows for the child to respond. This allows for children to have the ability to connect certain vocabulary to the exact moment, creating a map in a child's brain of words and meaning. In addition, a child's ability to point and understand the meaning behind its way of communication reflects their emerging social and cognitive ability. This social awareness is a key factor for communication and language learning further in life, and highlights how important early pointing is for children's developmental milestones.
Together this research expands on the understanding of how communication and comprehension centers around more than verbal language, but also gestural language. Especially when it comes to an area where an individual ( who can or cannot speak/fully or comprehend/communicate the verbal language) needs to fully understand it. When it comes to infants, pointing extends this idea, and reveals how important it is to facilitate gestural language in children, since it's usually the starting point of their verbal language comprehension. In many ways non-verbal language is the first language that we are all able to speak before finding our voices.
References
Kirk, Elizabeth, et al. “The Relationship between Infant Pointing and Language Development: A Meta-Analytic Review.” Developmental Review, vol. 64, June 2022, p. 101023, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2022.101023.
Paulus, Markus, et al. “The Emergence of Pointing as a Communicative Gesture: Age-Related Differences in Infants’ Non-Social and Social Use of the Index Finger.” Cognitive Development, vol. 65, Jan. 2023, p. 101298, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2023.101298.
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, vol. 43, no. 43, 2021, escholarship.org/uc/item/63r5d3qq.
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