Gestural development and its relation to cognition during the transition to language

Four Parisian-French infants, two male and two female, were observed bi-weekly at home with their parents or caretakers from 9 or 10 months until approximately 14 months. Their entire repertoire of communicative gestures was coded from videorecordings. Comment gestures, particularly pointing in a book and showing an object, increased after 11 months, and Request gestures involving the adult as an agent increased after 13 months. The appearance of these specific gestures followed the ability to perform object permanence tasks with visible displacements and means-ends tasks involving obtaining an object by pulling a string horizontally. More primitive Reach-request and Emotive gestures declined after 11 months. These findings are compared to those obtained from English-Canadian infants followed over the same age period.Portions of this paper were presented at the Vth European Conference in Developmental Psychology held in Seville in September, 1992. This research was supported by a fellowship to the first author from the Fondation Fyssen, Paris. The filming equipment was supplied by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Blvd. Raspail, Paris. We are very grateful to the French families for their cooperation and to Nurit Nadler and Grace Borzellino for their assistance in the coding of the gestures.