Skip to content
Research Article Open access CC BY 4.0

How Gestures Pave the Way for Lexical Development

Amir Yousef Farahmandi

Asian Journal of Language, Literature and Culture Studies · pp. 57–65 · Published 28 Mar 2019

Abstract

In development, children often use gestures to communicate before they use words. The question is whether these gestures merely precede language development or are fundamentally tied to it. I examined four children making the transition from single words to two-word combinations and found that gesture had a tight relation to the children’s lexical and syntactic development. First, a great many of the lexical items that each child produced initially in gesture later moved to that child’s verbal lexicon. Second, children who were first to produce gesture-plus-word combinations conveying two elements in a proposition were also first to produce two-word combinations. Changes in gesture also predict changes in language, suggesting that early gesture may facilitate future developments in language.

Gesture words language development lexical development syntactic development

Cited by 0

No indexed citations yet.

Article metrics

Real usage data collected on this platform.

0

Page views

0

PDF downloads

0

Outbound clicks

0

Citations

Views by country

Approximate, from request IP at view time — not citizenship or institution. Countries with fewer than 5 views are grouped as "Other".

No views recorded yet.

Traffic sources

Referring site, by host.

No traffic recorded yet.

Views and downloads exclude known bots/crawlers. Citations combines this platform's own DOI-resolved index with each external source's own reported total — see Cited by above for individually listed citing works. Last refreshed 0 seconds ago.