Jeff Allen request/gestures

[Patricia Zukow-Goldring]

In response to Jeff Allen's request of 3/22.

When Gestures Speak Louder Than Words.
 (No claims re 50% of communication, etc!)

Infants often do not initially understand caregiver messages (Catch it!).
Subsequent messages in which caregivers provide perceptual
structure/information with gestures (demonstrating how to catch)
overwhelmingly
lead to achieving a practical understanding of ongoing events. When
caregivers'
subsequent messages are expressed only with more specific verbal utterances
(Catch the ball!), a common understanding is rarely achieved.

This longitudinal research was conducted during the prelinguistic period
from 6
months through the one-word period (19-24 months). There were 5 Euro-American,
English-speaking families and 6 Latino, Spanish-speaking families. The data
were collected in suburbs of Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Briefly, words cannot explain unless a person already knows what words mean.
Learning what words mean is what the infant "means" to learn. These caregivers
assembled messages by "saying and showing", so their infants could perceive
what they said and did.

Pat Zukow-Goldring
Zukow-Goldring, P. (in press). Perceiving referring actions: Latino and
Euro-American
        caregivers and infants comprehending speech. In K. L. Nelson, A.
Aksu-Koc, &
         C. Johnson (Eds.), Children's Language, Vol. 11. Hillsdale NJ:
Erlbaum.


Zukow-Goldring, P. G. (1997). A social ecological realist approach to the
emergence of the
        lexicon: Educating attention to amodal invariants in gesture and
speech." In C. Dent-Read &
P. Zukow-Goldring (Eds.), Evolving explanations of development: Ecological
approaches
to organism-environment systems (pp. 199-250). Washington, D. C.: American
Psychological
Association.

Zukow-Goldring, P. (1996). Sensitive caregivers foster the comprehension of
speech: When
        gestures speak louder than words. Early Development and Parenting, 5
(4), 195-211.


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