Gesture-speech combinations as a transition to multiword utterances

This study was designed to determine if certain types of gesture-speech combinations act as transitional phenomena preceding production of 2-word utterances. Ten normally developing children with a mean age of 15 months at the beginning of the study participated in this research. The children were sampled longitudinally at monthly intervals as they approached the onset of early multiword utterances. Temporally synchronized gesture-speech combinations were analyzed over a 6-month period to describe whether they encoded 1 semantic element (pointing to a car and saying "car") or 2 semantic elements (pointing to a car and saying "big"). These gesture-speech combinations were examined in terms of their onset in relation to early multiword combinations. It was found that there was a significant increase in gesture-speech combinations encoding 2 semantic elements during the 6-month period and that the onset of these combinations preceded or co-occurred with the 1st productions of multiword utterances. This finding, coupled with prior studies on smaller numbers of participants, suggests that gesture-speech combinations encoding 2 elements may be a transitional element between single-word communication and the onset of multiword combinations.