Beyond the pre-communicative medium: A cross-behavioral prospective study on the role of gesture in language and play...

This study prospectively explored the role of declarative and imperative gestures in the development of language and symbolic play milestones using a multi-measure micro-analytic approach. Nine infants were observed in their natural home environments once a month for a one hour session between the ages of 8-16 months by recording their spontaneous pre-lingual and lingual form usages and symbolic play acts. This framework enabled the coding of object- and human-directed vocalization, babbling, speech, declarative and imperative gestures, and four types of symbolic play acts: single-object play, single-object sequences, multi-object play, and multi-object sequences. The relative degree of usage of each type of behavior was examined. The results showed that declarative and imperative gestures frequency of usage are related to all language milestones for the short and long term. The infants' gestures were related to symbolic play for the long term; their declarative gestures supported most of the levels of symbolic acts and their imperative gestures supported multi-object sequences. The results are explained in terms of the structural building blocks and contextual framework of gestures, which may scaffold infants' preliminary symbolic behavior.