Early pointing gestures.

Abstract

Not only is pointing abundantly used with a variety of functions across the globe in different cultures by adults, but it is one of the first gestures that enters children's productive repertoire (see Figure 3.1), often preceding first recognizable spoken words (Carpenter et al., 1998). It is considered a developmental cognitive and social milestone, as well as one of the first forms of communication used as humankind developed and thus a basic tool for cooperation (see Figure 3 .2;Tomasello, 2008).Despite being regarded as the simplest, most primary form of communicative action (Wundt, 1912) because of its phylogenetic and ontogenetic role as a precursor to human language, pointing is a fascinating, rich semiotic process that is resourcefully used long after children have mastered the complexities of language.In most parts of the world, pointing pervades all types of conversations (see Cooperrider & Mesh, Chapter 2, this volume) as an unmatched tool for orienting attention (Peirce, 1897/1932), as is well epitomized in several art forms. 1 As pointed out by Cooperrider (2020), Pointing may also be seen as a semiotic primitive, a philosophical puzzle, a communicative workhorse, a protean universal, a social tool, a widespread taboo, a partner of language, a part of language, a fixture of art, a graphical icon, a cognitive prop, a developmental milestone, a diagnostic window, a cross-species litmus test, and an evolutionary stepping-stone. (p. 1)Pointing can be described as the first communicative gesture or a gesture used to complement speech, a symbolic resource of its own, or incorporated into sign languages in a grammaticalized form and used, for example, as the equivalent of demonstrative or personal pronouns. 2 There have been descriptions of its various functions in child development and ongoing debates about its being separate from (Petitto, 1992) or part of (Haviland, 1998) language, of its being a ritualized extension of natural reaching movements (Vygotsky, 1934(Vygotsky, /1985, or a highly conventionalized form of expression that needs to be learned (Wittgenstein, 1953(Wittgenstein, /1958.In this chapter, I do not reduce the abundant literature on this multifaceted process to a few pages (but see Cooperrider, 2020, for a beautiful panorama), nor do I give definite answers to all the ongoing debates. Rather, by adopting a usage-based, functional approach, I focus on the emergence and uses of pointing in child-adult

Children's multimodal language development from an interactional, usage‐based, and cognitive perspective

“…The child's movement expressed in what the father interprets and performs himself as a gesture, has been transformed into a multimodal performance. This performance is repeated daily in a variety of contexts by all the adults in the family so that it becomes what Bruner (1983) calls a format which the little girl will take up 4 months later herself (see Morgenstern, 2022 for a more extensive analysis).…”

“…Even though she does not yet master the phoneme (r) and does not always use it, the rest of the multimodal construction used to attract the other's attention on a specific element of a picture in a book is replicated. Madeleine has learnt to pair a multimodal form with a specific function and to use it efficiently (see Morgenstern, 2022 for a more extensive analysis). As shown in our literature review, children take up prosodic patterns very early in order to transmit their intentions through a large range of “speech” acts (Konopczynski, 1990).…”

“…Pointing is very quickly performed with an extended index finger in a variety of cultures. Pointing gestures (point at toy stuffed crocodile) offer children a technique to refer to objects before they can produce the conventional words for those objects (Morgenstern, 2022). Then a number of recurrent largely conventional gestures are used around 1 year old (waving with one hand when someone leaves or arrives, clapping with two hands to congratulate, palm up open hands to express absence) or family specific idiosyncratic gestures (such as Madeleine tapping with one hand in the air to refer to her tambourine, see Video 0 available in the Supporting Information).…”

“…When children master speech—which involves a richer lexicon, complexity of their syntax, pragmatic functions of prosody, use of narrative, and argumentative skills—sometime between approximately the ages of 4 and 6, they also have the ability to productively resort to and combine the semiotic resources at their disposal according to their environment, the activity they are in, their interlocutor(s) or their communicative intent. Interactional, usage‐based, and cognitive theoretical approaches can be combined to capture the development of language—or rather what we can call “languaging” to refer to language use (Linell, 2009; Morgenstern, 2022)—in the variably multimodal (Cienki, 2012) child.…”