title: Gestural development and its relation to a child's early vocabulary.
abstract: Gesture and language are tightly connected during the development of a child's communication skills. Gestures mostly precede and define the way of language development; even opposite direction has been found. Few recent studies have focused on the relationship between specific gestures and specific word categories, emphasising that the onset of one gesture type predicts the onset of certain word categories or of the earliest word combinations. The aim of this study was to analyse predicative roles of different gesture types on the onset of first word categories in a child's early expressive vocabulary. Our data show that different types of gestures predict different types of word production. Object gestures predict open-class words from the age of 13 months, and gestural routines predict closed-class words and social terms from 8 months. Receptive vocabulary has a strong mediating role for all linguistically defined categories (open- and closed-class words) but not for social terms, which are the largest word category in a child's early expressive vocabulary. Accordingly, main contribution of this study is to define the impact of different gesture types on early expressive vocabulary and to determine the role of receptive vocabulary in gesture-expressive vocabulary relation in the Croatian language.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Psycholinguistic Research, Department of Speech and Language Pathology, Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia.
authors.forename: Jelena Kuvač
authors.initials: JK
authors.lastname: Kraljević
authors.affiliation: Child's Communication Study Lab, Department of Speech and Language Pathology, Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia. Electronic address: mcepanec@globalnet.hr.
authors.forename: Maja
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cepanec
authors.affiliation: Child's Communication Study Lab, Department of Speech and Language Pathology, Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia.
authors.forename: Sanja
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Simleša
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D002663:Child Language; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology; D017523:Croatia; D005260:Female; D005868:Gestures; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008037:Linguistics; D008297:Male; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014825:Vocabulary
keywords: Expressive vocabulary; Gesture; Social cognition