Introduction to Special Issue: Gestures and communicative development

Abstract

What does hand movement have to do with language and communicative development? This Introduction proposes that language acquisition researchers have at least four reasons to be interested in gesture and communicative development. First, children begin to gesture before talking. Second, children continue to gesture even after they start to talk, and through to adulthood. Third, recent theoretical perspectives on language acquisition have advanced a functional approach to communicative development in which usage is crucial in language acquisition. Fourth, the argument that spoken language evolved from gestures raises intriguing questions about the relationship between phylogenesis and ontogenesis. We outline different developmental trajectories for different kinds of gestures, developmental changes in the relationship between speech and gestures, and the developmental analysis of gesture functions. The six new empirical studies reported in this Special Issue are summarized.