Edited by F. Nihan Ketrez, Aylin C. Küntay, Şeyda Özçalışkan and Aslı Özyürek
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 21] 2017
► pp. 69–84
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.