Nora was an excellent talker, starting at a very young age, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t express herself in other ways. Here, for example, she points to a the item she wants. It’s entirely possible that she didn’t yet know the word “stick,” but she was still quite able to express her desire.
But what happens if a child is particularly successful at expressing her needs using gestures? Does development of spoken language suffer? One approach to this problem is to look language development in cultures that tend to use more gestures. Many studies have confirmed the “stereotype” that Italians are more physically expressive than other groups. It stands to reason that even Italian infants probably learn more gestures at an earlier age than babies in other cultures.
An international group led by Jana Iverson carefully observed three Italian infants and three American infants during the critical early period of language learning, from 10 months to 24 months old. The babies were videotaped for 30 minutes each month doing three activities: playing with their own toys, playing with a standard set of toys provided by the experimenter, and at mealtime. Speech and gestures were carefully categorized.
Gestures can be broken down into two distinct categories: deictic and representational. Deictic gestures are those that refer to something around the child — pointing, showing an object, or reaching for something. Representational gestures have meaning independent of the objects around the child: nodding yes, holding a fist to the ear to mean “telephone,” and so on. This graph compares deictic gestures in the five months leading up to the point where children could speak in two-word phrases:
For deictic gestures (pointing, etc.), there’s not much difference between Italian and American infants. In some months, Americans actually used deictic gestures significantly more often than Italians. But what about representational gestures? Here are those results:
Now we see a dramatic difference: Italian children use significantly more representational gestures — where the gesture itself conveys meaning — than American children. Indeed, Italians use these gestures nearly as often as deictic gestures. So how does the use of gestures affect spoken language learning? This graph charts the number of different spoken words used by the children:
The American children said significantly more words at each month of development than Italian children. They also spoke more two-word phrases. However, the difference is perfectly accounted for by the greater number of representational gestures used by Italians. There’s also an Italian version of a two-word phrase: a gesture and a phrase, which once again compensates for the difference in number of two-word phrases used.
Though this is a very small group of children, the results are statistically significant, and they match well with other research that finds adult Italians use more gestures than Americans. There’s certainly no evidence that Italians can’t communicate just as well as Americans — they simply have a richer assortment of gestures to complement spoken language.
J. M. Iverson, O. Capirci, V. Volterra, S. Goldin-Meadow (2008). Learning to talk in a gesture-rich world: Early communication in Italian vs. American children First Language, 28 (2), 164-181 DOI: 10.1177/0142723707087736