Abstract
The present study investigated the moderating role of early communicative pointing on the developmental trends of word comprehension and production over the second year of life. Seventy-seven infants were involved in an experimental pointing task (T-POINT) in sessions at 9 and 12 months, and the MB-CDI questionnaire was filled in by their parents at 15, 18 and 24 months. Based on the age at which the infants were seen to use pointing, they were classified into three groups: the ‘Early’ pointers, who first pointed during the 9-month session; the ‘Typical’ pointers, who first pointed in the 12-month session; and the ‘Late’ pointers, who never pointed in either of the sessions. Using multilevel modelling, we traced the developmental trajectories and individual differences for the two lexical domains of word comprehension and production according to the three pointing groups. The main results showed that compared to the Typical pointers: (i) the Early pointers were faster for word comprehension development, and were similar for word production; (ii) the Late pointers showed lexical delay before 18 months for word comprehension, and between 18 and 24 months for word production. These data are discussed in light of the different roles of early pointing on receptive compared to expressive vocabulary development.
Highlights
A traditional theme in infant research is the association between gesture and first language development, and between pointing and lexical acquisition [1,2].Empirical data have consistently confirmed this relation as concurrent and predictive [3].a full understanding of how pointing impacts on the longitudinal progression of lexical acquisition has yet to be achieved
Our descriptive data confirmed that word comprehension precedes word production during the second year of life
By applying multilevel modelling to these longitudinal data and including the age of the first observed pointing in the model, we have shown that infants who pointed at an early age in our experimental sessions improved the rate of their word comprehension development, but not that of their word production, whereas late pointers were slower in the increase in both receptive and expressive skills
Summary
A traditional theme in infant research is the association between gesture and first language development, and between pointing and lexical acquisition [1,2].Empirical data have consistently confirmed this relation as concurrent and predictive [3].a full understanding of how pointing impacts on the longitudinal progression of lexical acquisition has yet to be achieved. Differences between the two domains in pointing-language relationships have already been found by research How these differences interact with the advancing of the ability to comprehend and produce words over the first years of life has not been examined so far
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