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Pointing and social awareness: declaring and requesting in the second year
1University of Padova, Dipartimento di Psicologia dello Sviluppo e della Socializzazione, Italy. franco@ipdunivx.unipd.it
Journal of Child Language
|June 1, 1996
Summary
Infants use different gestures, like pointing, based on communication goals. Pointing gestures, crucial for language development, emerge from an understanding of social attention and sharing.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Primatology
- Linguistics
Background:
- Gestures play a crucial role in early communication.
- Understanding the communicative functions of gestures is key to understanding early language acquisition.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the production of pointing and reaching gestures in infants.
- To differentiate gesture production based on communicative context (declarative-referential vs. imperative-instrumental).
- To explore the developmental trajectory of pointing and its relation to social cognition.
Main Methods:
- Observational study of 47 infants (1;0-1;6) and 7 infants (0;10).
- Two experiments contrasting declarative-referential and imperative-instrumental communication conditions.
- Analysis of gestures, vocalizations, and visual checking with a social partner.
Main Results:
- Gesture production varied significantly across experimental conditions.
- Reaching gestures were exclusive to imperative-instrumental contexts.
- Pointing gestures were characteristic of declarative-referential contexts and showed developmental changes in social checking patterns.
Conclusions:
- Pointing gestures are distinct from reaching gestures, linked to specific communicative intentions.
- The development of pointing may depend on an infant's emerging awareness of others' psychological states (attention, sharing).
- Pointing's unique developmental role in language acquisition is likely tied to its foundation in social-cognitive understanding.