Gesture and Multimodal Development

We gesture while we talk and children use gestures prior to words to communicate during the first year. Later, as words become the preferred form of communication, children continue to gesture to reinforce or extend the spoken messages or even to replace them. This volume, originally published as a Special Issue of Gesture 10:2/3 (2010), brings together studies from language acquisition and developmental psychology. It provides a review of common theoretical, methodological and empirical themes, and the contributions address topics such as gesture use in prelinguistic infants with a special and new focus on pointing, the relationship between gestures and lexical development in typically developing and deaf children and even how gesture can help to learn mathematics. All in all, it brings additional evidence on how gestures are related to language, communication and mind development.

Olga Capirci, Head of “Gesture, Language and Developmental Disorders” Unit, ISTC – CNR, Rome, Italy:
This collection of papers presents a wonderful and vast overview of contemporary research on gesture and multimodal development, representing multiple theoretical and applied perspectives. [...] It constitutes a major contribution not only to the study of gestural and multimodal development, but also to the understanding of cognitive and communicative development in a more broad sense.