Gestural-vocal coordination

Abstract

Esta es la versión de autor del artículo publicado en: This is an author produced version of a paper published in:Gesture 12.1 (2012): 16-39 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/gest.12.1.02mur Copyright: © John Benjamins Publishing CompanyEl acceso a la versión del editor puede requerir la suscripción del recurso Access to the published version may require subscription AbstractThe aim of this study was to examine longitudinally gestural and vocal coordination in multimodal communicative patterns during the period of transition to first words, and its role in early lexical development. Eleven monolingual Spanish children were observed from 9 to 12 and 15 months of age in a semi-structured play situation. We obtained three main findings: (1) the use of multimodal patterns of communication increases significantly with age during the period studied; (2) the rate of use of those multimodal patterns at 12 months predicts lexical development at 15 months; and (3) the use of pointing gesture at 12 months, especially when it is accompanied of vocalization and social use of gaze, is the best predictor of lexical outcome at 15 months. Our findings support the idea that gestures, gazes and vocalizations are part of an integrated and developing system that children use flexibly to communicate from early on. The coordination of these three types of elements, especially when pointing gesture is involved, has a predictive value on early lexical development and appears as a key for progress in language development.

Properties of vocalization- and gesture-combinations in the transition to first words

“…This finding is consistent with previous research showing the predictive character of pointing with vocalization (Igualada et al, 2015;Murillo & Belinchón, 2012; Gros-Louis, 2014) on later language abilities, and the relevance of declarative function on this pointing predictive role (Colonnesi et al, 2010).…”

“…Murillo and Belinchón (2012) found that the coordinated use of gesture (specifically, pointing), vocalization and social gaze at 1;0 is a strong predictor of lexical development three months later. Wu and GrosLouis (2014) also found that gesture-vocal coordination was related to infants' linguistic skills at 1;3.…”

Language development at 18 months is related to multimodal communicative strategies at 12 months

“…To our knowledge only two studies have explored the predictive role of early simultaneous gesture-speech combinations on later language development. In Murillo and Belinchón (2012), a sample of eleven parent-infant dyads were recorded interacting in a semistructured play context at three longitudinal moments, namely at 9, 12, and 15 months. The results showed that the use of pointing gestures at 12 months, especially when accompanied by vocalizations and directed gaze on the part of the infant, correlated positively with vocabulary development at 15 months of age.…”

“…By using an experimental task which favors a specific declarative intention from the child and which controls for the adult's patterns of responses, we aim at extending results elicited in research by Murillo and Belinchón (2012) and Wu and Gros-Louis (2014) through an experimental task where infants are not interacting with their mothers. This controlled scenario will allow us to more thoroughly analyze the connection between infants' communicative strategies and their language outcomes 6 months later (measures in those studies were obtained just 3 months later, at 15 months of age).…”

Nine-month-old infants are sensitive to the temporal alignment of prosodic and gesture prominences

“…However, these rhythmic movements are not yet communicative (Ejiri & Masataka, 2001). The first communicative gestures, pointing gestures, start being produced in isolation around 8-10 months of age (Bates et al, 1975) and it is not until around 15 months of age that infants combine most of their pointing gestures with speech (Butcher & Goldin-Meadow, 2000;Igualada et al, under review;Murillo & Belinchón, 2012). In these gesture-speech combinations it seems that infants are already able to temporally align gesture and speech in an adult-like way, since (1) gestures start before the vocalizations associated with them, (2) the stroke onset coincides with the onset of the prominent syllable in speech, and (3) the gesture apex is produced before the end of the accented syllable (Esteve-Gibert & Prieto, 2014).…”