Children’s lexical skills and task demands affect gestural behavior in mothers of late-talking children and children with typical language development
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Angela Grimminger
Abstract
To evaluate the influence of lexical development and task demands on maternal gestural behavior, we observed 17 German-speaking mothers and their children with typically language development (TD) and 9 mothers with their late talkers (LT) aged 22–25 months in task-oriented dialogues. Mothers instructed their children to put two objects together; canonical and — as more difficult tasks — noncanonical spatial relationships were requested. Deictic gestures were dominant in both groups and were used to reinforce speech. However, LT’s mothers gestured more than TD’s mothers and tended to hold their gestures throughout a complete utterance. Regarding the task demands, all mothers gestured more in noncanonical settings and this trend was more pronounced in LT’s mothers. Thus, certain aspects of gestural motherese (frequency and duration of gestures but not redundancy) seem to ‘operate’ on a scale between task difficulty and children’s language skills, suggesting that maternal communicative behavior is fine-tuned to children’s learning process.
Abstract
To evaluate the influence of lexical development and task demands on maternal gestural behavior, we observed 17 German-speaking mothers and their children with typically language development (TD) and 9 mothers with their late talkers (LT) aged 22–25 months in task-oriented dialogues. Mothers instructed their children to put two objects together; canonical and — as more difficult tasks — noncanonical spatial relationships were requested. Deictic gestures were dominant in both groups and were used to reinforce speech. However, LT’s mothers gestured more than TD’s mothers and tended to hold their gestures throughout a complete utterance. Regarding the task demands, all mothers gestured more in noncanonical settings and this trend was more pronounced in LT’s mothers. Thus, certain aspects of gestural motherese (frequency and duration of gestures but not redundancy) seem to ‘operate’ on a scale between task difficulty and children’s language skills, suggesting that maternal communicative behavior is fine-tuned to children’s learning process.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents vii
- About the authors ix
- Gesture and multimodal development 1
- Pointing gesture in young children 7
- Support or competition? 27
- From gesture to sign and from gesture to word 49
- How the hands control attention during early word learning 79
- Infant movement as a window into language processing 99
- Children’s lexical skills and task demands affect gestural behavior in mothers of late-talking children and children with typical language development 129
- The type of shared activity shapes caregiver and infant communication 157
- Transcribing and annotating multimodality 175
- Mathematical learning and gesture 199
- Index 221
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents vii
- About the authors ix
- Gesture and multimodal development 1
- Pointing gesture in young children 7
- Support or competition? 27
- From gesture to sign and from gesture to word 49
- How the hands control attention during early word learning 79
- Infant movement as a window into language processing 99
- Children’s lexical skills and task demands affect gestural behavior in mothers of late-talking children and children with typical language development 129
- The type of shared activity shapes caregiver and infant communication 157
- Transcribing and annotating multimodality 175
- Mathematical learning and gesture 199
- Index 221
