Caregivers provide more labeling responses to infants' pointing than to infants' object-directed vocalizations

• Published in: Journal of child language Vol. 42; no. 3; pp. 538 - 561
• Main Authors: WU, ZHEN, GROS-LOUIS, JULIE
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 01.05.2015
• Subjects: Babies; Caregiver Child Relationship; Caregivers; Child development; Comparative Analysis; Fathers; Female; Gender Differences; Gestures; Humans; Infant; Infant Behavior; Infants; Language Acquisition; Language Development; Male; Mothers; Naming; Native language acquisition; Nonverbal Communication; Parent-Child Relations; Parents; Parents & parenting; Pointing; Responses; Verbal Behavior; Verbal Communication; Vocabulary Development; Young Children
• ISSN: 0305-0009; 1469-7602
• DOI: 10.1017/S0305000914000221

Existing studies have observed a robust relationship between infants' pointing gestures and language outcomes. By contrast, infants' overall vocal production is not related to language outcomes. One possible explanation for the association between pointing and language is that pointing gestures, as compared to vocalizations, may elicit more verbal responses from social partners that are facilitative for language learning. To test this, we observed forty-seven infants aged 1;0 during free play with their mothers and fathers separately to compare parents' verbal responses to infants' pointing gestures and object-directed vocalizations. Results showed that, compared to object-directed vocalizations, infants' pointing elicited more verbal responses from parents, particularly object labels. Moreover, mothers were more likely than fathers to provide labels. These results may help explain why pointing is associated with indices of language acquisition, but the production of vocalizations is not.