Abstract
Children use gesture to refer to objects before they produce labels for these objects
and gesture–speech combinations to convey semantic relations between objects before
conveying sentences in speech—a trajectory that remains largely intact across children
with different developmental profiles. Can the developmental changes that we observe
in children be traced back to the gestural input that children receive from their
parents? A review of previous work shows that parents provide models for their children
for the types of gestures and gesture–speech combinations to produce, and do so by
modifying their gestures to meet the communicative needs of their children. More importantly,
the gestures that parents produce, in addition to providing models, help children
learn labels for referents and semantic relations between these referents and even
predict the extent of children's vocabularies several years later. The existing research
thus highlights the important role parental gestures play in shaping children's language
learning trajectory.
Keywords
Gesture production - gesture input - language development - gesture–speech combination
