The Development of Pointing: From Personal Directedness to Interpersonal Direction

Carpendale, Jeremy I. M.; Carpendale, Ailidh B.

doi:10.1159/000315168

Cited by 83 publications

(93 citation statements)

References 90 publications

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“…Future studies are needed to disentangle the individual contributions of social-cognitive processing skills and socialinteractional experiences in the emergence of particular forms of pointing. Some researchers take evidence of infant social-cognitive skills and significant task inter-correlations to reveal a cognitive foundation of interaction Csibra & Gergely, 2009), while others take the absence of inter-correlations among some cognitive tasks to indicate a social-relational emergence of social understanding (Carpendale & Lewis, 2004;Carpendale & Carpendale, 2010). Current results suggest that the ontogenetic origins of reference lie in both the shared social practice and the cognitive skills of looking at things together, which turn infants' initially embodied looking and indicating into fullfledged communicative acts with a bi-directional understanding of reference once infants point with the index finger around 12 months of age.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual differences in social, cognitive, and morphological aspects of infant pointing

Liszkowski

Tomasello

2011

Cognitive Development

111

164

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a b s t r a c tLittle is known about the origins of the pointing gesture. We sought to gain insight into its emergence by investigating individual differences in the pointing of 12-month-old infants in two ways. First, we looked at differences in the communicative and interactional uses of pointing and asked how different hand shapes relate to point frequency, accompanying vocalizations, and mothers' pointing. Second, we looked at differences in social-cognitive skills of point comprehension and imitation and tested whether these were related to infants' own pointing. Infants' and mothers' spontaneous pointing correlated with one another, as did infants' point production and comprehension. In particular, infants' indexfinger pointing had a profile different from simple whole-hand pointing. It was more frequent, it was more often accompanied by vocalizations, and it correlated more strongly with comprehension of pointing (especially to occluded referents). We conclude that whole-hand and index-finger pointing differ qualitatively and suggest that it is index-finger pointing that first embodies infants' understanding of communicative intentions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual differences in social, cognitive, and morphological aspects of infant pointing

Liszkowski

Tomasello

2011

Cognitive Development

111

164

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“…It appears in human infancy before language, before the first year andas far as we know-across cultures [64]. On the one hand, it may arise from ritualization of a reaching gesture [65], but this will only account for the so-called imperative pointings. Although apes display begging behaviour with the open hand [29,66], offer food in the palm [28] and may perform what appear to be deictic gestures with the whole hand [67] or localized referential actions with deictic elements [68], they do not point with the index finger (but see [69] for some possible exceptions in captive apes).…”

Section: (B) Indexicality and Iconicity In Language Evolutionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The origin of human multi-modal communication

Levinson

Holler

2014

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

282

187

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One reason for the apparent gulf between animal and human communication systems is that the focus has been on the presence or the absence of language as a complex expressive system built on speech. But language normally occurs embedded within an interactional exchange of multi-modal signals. If this larger perspective takes central focus, then it becomes apparent that human communication has a layered structure, where the layers may be plausibly assigned different phylogenetic and evolutionary origins—especially in the light of recent thoughts on the emergence of voluntary breathing and spoken language. This perspective helps us to appreciate the different roles that the different modalities play in human communication, as well as how they function as one integrated system despite their different roles and origins. It also offers possibilities for reconciling the ‘gesture-first hypothesis’ with that of gesture and speech having evolved together, hand in hand—or hand in mouth, rather—as one system

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“…This suggests, first, that the significance of infant pointing lies in the whole context of socio-cognitive development in which it is embedded and, second, that while socio-cognitive development in the infant is the prerequisite, socialization processes may start to affect how this plays out. One possibility suggested by Carpendale and Carpendale [2010] is that infants start by pointing in relation to their own attention but that pointing starts to become incorporated into a socio-cognitive framework as a result of interactions with their caregivers. This would provide a possible scenario for the results in the study by Matthews et al [2012]: early gaze following by the infant is affected by the mother's pointing, which gives rise to higher rates of gaze monitoring by the infant.…”

Section: Cross-cultural Studies Of Infant Socio-communicative Developmentioning

confidence: 99%

Early Communicative Development in Two Cultures: A Comparison of the Communicative Environments of Children from Two Cultures

Lieven

Stoll

2013

Human Development

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The nature of young children's communicative environment has been central to theoretical debates about the importance of innate and environmental factors in the development of communication and language. In this paper, we explore aspects of the communicative development and environment of young children growing up in two very different cultures, one in a village of eastern Nepal and the other in a rural area of Western Germany. We analysed longitudinal video recordings of 6 children from each culture in naturalistic settings, at age-matched time points over a period of 8 months. Four children were 8 months old at the outset of the study, 4 were 2 years and 2 months old, and 4 were 3 years old. There were major differences between cultures in the number of adults and children present during the recordings, with other children playing an increasingly important role for the older children in the Nepal recordings. We found no difference between cultures in the onset of pointing and imitation or of reaching, requesting and offering, indicating that these behaviours may be part of a human-specific timetable for socio-cognitive development. We also found that imitation by both the target children and those around them was strictly limited to the youngest group in both cultures. This suggests that imitation may be very important for early development in the prelinguistic phase, while around the age of 2, with the child's developing competence, other ways of interacting take over. The theoretical implications of our results are discussed with reference to the roles of child-intrinsic and environmental factors in the developmental process.

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The Development of Pointing: From Personal Directedness to Interpersonal Direction

Cited by 83 publications

References 90 publications

Individual differences in social, cognitive, and morphological aspects of infant pointing

Individual differences in social, cognitive, and morphological aspects of infant pointing

The origin of human multi-modal communication

Early Communicative Development in Two Cultures: A Comparison of the Communicative Environments of Children from Two Cultures

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