Preschool children's use of decontextualized language, or talk about abstract topics beyond the here-and-now, is predictive of their kindergarten readiness and is associated with the frequency of parents' own use of decontextualized language. Does a brief, parent-focused intervention conveying the importance of decontextualized language cause parents to increase their use of these conversations, and as a result, their children's? We examined this question by randomly assigning 36 parents of 4-year-old children into a decontextualized language training condition or a no-treatment control condition and used mixed effects modeling to measure change (from baseline) in parent and child decontextualized language at 4 subsequent home mealtimes during the following month (N = 174 interactions including the baseline). Compared with the control condition, training condition dyads significantly increased their decontextualized talk and maintained these gains for the month following implementation. Furthermore, trained dyads generalized the program content to increase their use of similarly decontextualized, yet untrained conversations. These results demonstrate that an abstract feature of the input is malleable, and introduces a simple, scalable, and replicable approach to increase a feature of child language known to be foundational for children's school readiness. (PsycINFO Database Record

It is well established that deictic gestures, especially pointing, play an important role in children's language development. However, recent evidence suggests that other types of deictic gestures, specifically show and give gestures, emerge before pointing and are associated with later pointing. In the present study, we examined the development of show, give, and point gestures in a sample of 47 infants followed longitudinally from 10 to 16 months of age and asked whether there are certain ages during which different gestures are more or less predictive of language skills at 18 months. We also explored whether parents' responses vary as a function of child gesture types. Child gestures and parent responses were reliably coded from videotaped sessions of parent-child interactions. Language skills were measured at 18 months using standardized (Mullen Scales of Early Learning) and parent report (MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory) measures. We found that at 10 months, showþgive gestures were a better predictor of 18-month language skills than pointing gestures were, yet at 14 months, pointing gestures were a better predictor of 18-month language skills than showþgive gestures. By 16 months, children's use of speech in the interaction, not gesture, best predicted 18-month language skills. Parents responded to a higher proportion of showsþgives than to points at 10 months. These results demonstrate that different types of deictic gestures provide a window into language development at different points across infancy.

Young children communicate via gesture before they communicate through speech; research has documented strong associations between early gesture use and later language development (e.g., Iverson et al., 2008;Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009a). The goal of this chapter is to summarize the literature on relations between early gesture production and comprehension and language development in typically developing children with a focus on describing the nature of these relations and considering the mechanisms involved. In the first half of this chapter, we review relations between gesture and language skills at different points across early development. In the second half, we offer some potential non-mutually exclusive reasons, and corresponding evidence, for why early gesture might predict later language skills. We see gesture, in addition to being an important means of communication, as a useful indicator of concurrent social-cognitive abilities, a key predictor of later skills, and a potential area for early-intervention research.In this chapter, we define gestures as nonverbal communicative actions that are symbolic, or representational, in nature (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005), and we use the term language to refer to children's oral language skills, including their vocabulary knowledge and ability to produce multiword utterances (spoken or signed). Early in development, most gestures tend to be deictic, such as pointing and showing, and conventional (e.g., waving, nodding or shaking the head [Bates et al., 1975], giving a thumbs-up [Bates et al., 1975]). Later in toddlerhood, however, children also produce representational or iconic gestures (e.g., holding arms out wide to indicate "big"; Acredolo & Goodwyn, 1988;Özçalışkan et al., 2014). Actions that are noncommunicative are not considered gestures. For instance, many actions performed on objects (e.g., grabbing a block, turning pages) are not gestures, because they do not request a response from the interlocutor and hence are not communicative. However, holding up an object for the interlocutor to see is a deictic gesture because it serves the same deictic function (i.e., showing) as many pointing gestures. Because pointing is the most common gesture used by young children, our review highlights the role of pointing in language development while also examining other early gestures.

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