Title
Gesture development in Peruvian children and its relationship with vocalizations and vocabulary
Date Issued
22 November 2021
Access level
metadata only access
Resource Type
journal article
Author(s)
Publisher(s)
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Abstract
We examine gestural development, and correlations between gesture types, vocalizations and vocabulary at ages 8 to 15 months, employing data from MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories for Peruvian Spanish, in the first such study with Peruvian children. Results show (1) significant change with age in the production of gesture types, with older children producing more; (2) important correlations between gesture types, and both vocalization types and vocabulary after controlling for age effects; and (3) correlations between the trajectory of the pointing gesture in its two modalities (whole-hand and index-finger) with age, vocalizations, and vocabulary, an effect that persists with respect to vocalizations after controlling for age. Our findings, based on a sample from a non-weird population, support a key role for gesture production in early communicative and linguistic development.
Start page
1
End page
29
Volume
20
Issue
1
Language
English
OCDE Knowledge area
Lingüística
Scopus EID
2-s2.0-85120163536
Source
Gesture
ISSN of the container
15681475
Sponsor(s)
Funding text This project of the Research Group on Language Acquisition (GRIAL, for its acronym in Spanish), was funded by the Research Management Directorate of Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, through grants DGI-2015-1-0020 and 2016-1-0065, to María Fernández-Flecha and GRIAL, respectively.
Sources of information: Directorio de Producción Científica Scopus