Gesture development in Peruvianchildren and its relationship with vocalizations and vocabulary

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.

Effect of sex and dyad composition on speech and gesture development of singleton and twin children

Children's early vocabulary shows sex differences – with boys having smaller vocabularies than age-comparable girls – a pattern that becomes evident in both singletons and twins. Twins also use fewer words than their singleton peers. However, we know relatively less about sex differences in early gesturing in singletons or twins, and also how singletons and twins might differ in their early gesture use. We examine the patterns of speech and gesture production of singleton and twin children, ages 0;10-to-3;4, during structured parent-child play. Boys and girls – singleton or twin – were similar in speech and gesture production, but singletons used a greater amount and diversity of speech and gestures than twins. There was no effect of twin dyad type (boy-boy, girl-girl, boy-girl) on either speech or gesture production. These results confirm earlier research showing close integration between gesture and speech in singletons in early language development, and further extend these patterns to twin children.

A Longitudinal Study Investigating the Effects of Workload and Exposure on 3D Gestural Human Computer Interaction

3D gestural input technology has the ability to expand human-computer interaction (HCI) beyond traditional input modalities. It is known that context and domain expertise are influential to gesture development, but there is little known about other individual factors such as workload and exposure. Therefore, the objective of this work is to explore the effects of workload and exposure on intuitive gesture choice and reaction time under a general HCI context. A longitudinal study was conducted to investigate the differences in intuitive mappings for high and low workload conditions as well as across three separate experimental sessions. There were no differences in the intuitive mappings for either workload conditions or different experimental sessions. However, there was a difference in reaction times between all experimental sessions indicating there was a learning effect from the first to the last session in that the participants became faster in generating intuitive mappings.

Gesture Development in Infancy: Effects of Gender but not Bilingualism

Gesture is an important communication tool that provides insight into infants’ early language and cognitive development and predicts later language skills (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). While bilingual school-age children have been reported to gesture more than monolinguals (Nicoladis, Pika, & Marentette, 2009), there is a lack of research examining gesture use in infants exposed to more than one language. In this pre-registered study we compared three groups of 14‐month‐old infants (N = 150) learning French and/or English: bilinguals (hearing a second language at least 25% of the time), exposed (hearing a second language 10–24% of the time), and monolinguals (hearing one language 90% of the time or more). Parent-reported use of communicative gestures were gathered via the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI). Results showed that the three language groups produced a similar number of gesture types, suggesting that language exposure did not affect gesture development at this age. However, a gender effect was found, where girls produced more gesture types than boys. Overall, these results suggest that gender, but not language exposure, contributes to differences in gesture development in infancy.