Do pointing gestures by infants provoke comments from adults?
In the field of developmental psychology, there is speculation that pointing gestures by infants are good precursors of infant language acquisition, and some researchers have found correlations between these pointing gestures and some indices of language acquisition. Infants' pointing gestures are presumably related to language acquisition because they provoke verbal responses from adults. To test this, seven boys and six girls were observed during free play time in a nursery classroom, and post-pointing and matched-control data were collected. Comparison between these data confirmed that the nursery staff spoke to infants at a significantly earlier stage in post-pointing sequences, compared with control sequences, indicating that pointing gestures elicit verbal responses from adult caregivers.
Kishimoto
Takeshi
T
Department of Comparative and Developmental Psychology, Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University, 1-2 Yamadaoka, Suita, Osaka 565-0871, Japan. kissy@hus.osaka-u.ac.jp
Shizawa
Yasuhiro
Y
Yasuda
Jun
J
Hinobayashi
Toshihiko
T
Minami
Tetsuhiro
T
D000328:Adult; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology*; D003142:Communication; D005260:Female; D005868:Gestures; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D010988:Play and Playthings; D014706:Verbal Learning