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From Gesture in Conversation to Visible Action as Utterance: Essays in honor of Adam Kendon
Edited by Mandana Seyfeddinipur and Marianne Gullberg
[Not in series 188] 2014
► pp. 351–370

Gestures and multimodal development

Some key issues for language acquisition

ORCID logo | Université Toulouse 2, Unité de Recherche Interdisciplinaire Octogone (EA 4156), Laboratoire « Cognition, Communication et Développement », Institut des Sciences du Cerveau de Toulouse (France)
| Université Toulouse 2, CLLE-ERSS UMR CNRS 5263 (France)
| Université Stendhal-Grenoble 3, LIDILEM (France)

Children begin to gesture long before talking. Gestures, such as pointing or waving goodbye, constitute the principal means of interacting conventionally with others before the emergence of the lexicon. Children continue to gesture after they start to talk, and through to adulthood. In spite of that, some key concepts related to gesture and language acquisition, both theoretical and methodological, still remain unclear and/or are out of consensus among scholars, such as gestures and language acquisition and evolution, multimodal development, form and function in gestures, and gesture classification and terminology. To better understand language acquisition, we will discuss these issues in the light of Adam Kendon’s work.

Published online: 6 August 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/z.188.16gui
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