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Updated: May 15, 2026

Examining Gesture Production in the Presence of Communication Challenges
Published on: January 26, 2024
Sociocultural settings influence the emergence of prelinguistic deictic gestures
Dorothe Salomo1, Ulf Liszkowski
1Max-Planck-Research Group Communication before Language, Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics, Gelderland,The Netherlands.
Abstract:
Daily activities of forty-eight 8- to 15-month-olds and their interlocutors were observed to test for the presence and frequency of triadic joint actions and deictic gestures across three different cultures: Yucatec-Mayans (Mexico), Dutch (Netherlands), and Shanghai-Chinese (China). The amount of joint action and deictic gestures to which infants were exposed differed systematically across settings, allowing testing for the role of social-interactional input in the ontogeny of prelinguistic gestures. Infants gestured more and at an earlier age depending on the amount of joint action and gestures infants were exposed to, revealing early prelinguistic sociocultural differences. The study shows that the emergence of basic prelinguistic gestures is socially mediated, suggesting that others' actions structure the ontogeny of human communication from early on.
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