Point, walk, talk: Links between three early milestones, from observation and parental report.

Abstract

share first authorship. Elika Bergelson, Andrei Amatuni, and Shannon Dailey were in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester during data collection. Authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.

Developmental Pathways Between Infant Gestures and Symbolic Actions, and Children’s Communicative Skills at Age 5: Findings From the All Our Families Pregnancy Cohort

“…When considering communicative gestures, direct links have been found between pointing and language, for both language comprehension and production (e.g., Colonnesi, Stams, Koster, & Noom, 2010; Iverson & Goldin‐Meadow, 2005; Rowe & Goldin‐Meadow, 2009; Salo, Reeb‐Sutherland, Frenkel, Bowman, & Rowe, 2019). For example, a longitudinal study of infants aged 6–18 months demonstrated that children who pointed had larger vocabularies than children who did not point, in both cross‐sectional and longitudinal observations (Moore, Dailey, Garrison, Amatuni, & Bergelson, 2019). Since more rudimentary communicative gestures (e.g., pointing, reaching for objects, nodding head “no”) are a predictor of later language (e.g., vocabulary; Bavin et al, 2008), they may serve as a foundation for and indicator of later communicative skills (Liszkowski, 2008).…”

Children’s Social Information Seeking is Sensitive to Referential Ambiguity

“…One potential example of a mechanism for active information seeking in early word learning comes from research by Walle and Campos (2014), who reported links between the onset of walking and vocabulary growth (but cf. Moore, Dailey, Garrison, Amatuni, & Bergelson, 2019). A possible mechanism for this developmental connection is that walking children often use their greater ability to carry objects to bring their caregivers objects that interest them.…”

From babble to words: Infants’ early productions match words and objects in their environment

“…While none of the CPs included in our data were interpreted as words by our trained child phonology experts, it is possible that some CPs reflected early word production. In separate work assessing early milestones in this sample of infants (Moore et al, 2019), we find few infants produce their first word before 10 months (4 via observational data, 12 via parent report; parent vs. researcher criteria likely vary, especially for infants' very first word). However, even if infants were producing proto-words, rather than established babble consonants, our analysis relates this once again to VMS, since these vocalizations (whether babble or rudimentary words) were more often consistent when object labels contained consonants in infants' VMS repertoire.…”