Language Development in Infancy

In this study, infants appear to extract gestures from familiar motor routines or action sequences (e.g. flapping hands for a bird or pointing to an open hand to request more). Up to 87% of infants employ these symbolic gestures, using them in much the same way that they use words. These findings suggest that infants who are learning a spoken language initially accept both words and non-verbal symbols such as gestures. These data also reveal a developmental trend in which younger infants are actually more flexible than older infants at learning symbols other than words. Future investigations could explore how children use other symbolic forms such as non-verbal sounds and pictograms as names for object categories.

In addition, it seems that it could be argued from these data that infants possess an initial, general ability to learn symbols (both words and gestures) that develops into a more focused tendency in hearing infants to use words as the predominant form of referential communication. This production of words and gestures in infants' early development may be related to the input they receive. This is because parents frequently produce both verbal and gestural `labels' for objects during the same joint-attention episode. Thus, it seems that infants would have no reason, to discriminate between an adult’s intentions when they produce words and their intentions when they produce gestures. This seems a plausible explanation because the gestural symbols produced by infants tend to be acquired naturalistically over long periods of time during which primary caregivers and their infants employed the gestures as part of their daily established routines.