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Part of
Social Environment and Cognition in Language Development: Studies in honor of Ayhan Aksu-Koç
Edited by F. Nihan Ketrez, Aylin C. Küntay, Şeyda Özçalışkan and Aslı Özyürek
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 21] 2017
► pp. 69–84

Chapter 5
How robust is the effect of parental response to child gesture in facilitating child vocabulary development across different learners?

| Georgia State University, USA
| Georgia State University, USA
| Georgia State University, USA
Children express their burgeoning abilities in referential communication initially in gesture. Parents frequently provide verbal labels for the referents children express only in gesture but not yet in speech, which, in turn boosts children’s subsequent vocabulary development. In this chapter, we ask whether the link between early gesture and early words, mediated through parental verbal input, remains preserved across different learners, including typically developing, children learning one or more languages and children with developmental disorders learning language with delays. Overall, research to date indicates the robustness of the gesture-speech link in early vocabulary development across different learners; it also highlights the importance of parental verbal scaffold in this process.
Keywords: gesture, language development, bilingualism, developmental disorders, parental input, autism, Down syndrome
Article outline
  • 1.Gesture indexes children’s emerging vocabularies in speech
  • 2.Does gesture index children’s emerging vocabularies across different learners?
    • 2.1Children learning two languages
    • 2.2Children learning language with a developmental disorder
  • 3.Role of parental response in building the link between child gesture and vocabulary development across different learners
    • 3.1Parental responsiveness to child gesture in children learning two languages
    • 3.2Parental responsiveness to child gesture in children with developmental disorders
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.21.05ozc
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