What Gestures Do

Through parent gestures and speech, infants learn how to label objects and learn via elaboration (Dimitrova, 2013). Gestures from parents to their children at 14 months predict their child’s gestures.  A child that gestures more is more likely to have a larger vocabulary later in development (Rowe et al., 2008).  Gestures are useful in that they express ideas about objects visually and allow a parent to elaborate more on an object to their child.

Each participant is recorded in a session where the child and parent play with a set of toys and read a book.  Then, we record parents alone where they label objects, read a book, and play a map game.  We collect parent gestures when they are alone because we want to compare how their gestures differ from when they gesture to their children. Coders track the gestures that parents make during both kinds of tasks so we can code these gestures as data.

One of our undergraduate research assistants. Madhavi (shown in the picture at the top of the page with a blue jacket) says she codes data frame by frame in 30 millisecond increments.  She captures the start and end of these fleeting moments. Another assistant, Divisha, says she codes for the kinds of speech that parents use with their children with the goal of aligning this speech to the parent gestures. Chengyi does literature reviews to help us create a coding manual for understanding adult gestures since they differ from gestures with their children.

We predict that parents are more likely to produce gesture while labeling objects to provide different types of cues to young children. We predict that labels produced with gestures will have higher pitch which makes labels more noticeable from continuous speech.  Pitch and gesture go together because pitch provides vocal tone and inflection while gesture provides visual cues, enriching the experience for the child. 

Contributed by Işıl Doğan 2024

Parent gestures, in combination with speech, are associated with vocabulary outcomes in infants. Prior evidence shows us that parent gestures are useful in directing the attention of infants to objects of interest.  There may be a connection between parent gestures and a child's vocabulary as children acquire more gestures of their own.

For this study, we recruit infants ranging from 18 months to 20.5 months.   You may be interested in learning about gesture because these small actions serve as robust means of communication with your child.  Through the help of parents like you with your chidlren, we can learn so much about how infants learn about their world!