Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-wxk4p Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-31T13:09:19.189Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Properties of vocalization- and gesture-combinations in the transition to first words

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2015

EVA MURILLO  and
ALMUDENA CAPILLA
EVA MURILLO*
Affiliation:
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
ALMUDENA CAPILLA
Affiliation:
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
*
Address for correspondence: Eva Murillo, Departamento de Psicología Básica II, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Campus de Somosaguas, 28223, Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid, Spain. e-mail: eva.murillo@pdi.ucm.es
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Gestures and vocal elements interact from the early stages of language development, but the role of this interaction in the language learning process is not yet completely understood. The aim of this study is to explore gestural accompaniment's influence on the acoustic properties of vocalizations in the transition to first words. Eleven Spanish children aged 0;9 to 1;3 were observed longitudinally in a semi-structured play situation with an adult. Vocalizations were analyzed using several acoustic parameters based on those described by Oller et al. (2010). Results indicate that declarative vocalizations have fewer protosyllables than imperative ones, but only when they are produced with a gesture. Protosyllables duration and f(0) are more similar to those of mature speech when produced with pointing and declarative function than when produced with reaching gestures and imperative purposes. The proportion of canonical syllables produced increases with age, but only when combined with a gesture.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , July 2016 , pp. 890 - 913
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Acredolo, L. & Goodwyn, S. (1988). Symbolic gesturing in normal infants. Child Development 59, 450–66.Google Scholar
Balog, H. L. & Brentari, D. (2008). The relationship between early gestures and intonation. First Language 28, 141–63.Google Scholar
Bates, E., Benigni, L., Bretherton, I., Camaioni, L. & Volterra, V. (1979). The emergence of symbols: cognition and communication in infancy. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Begus, K., Gliga, T. & Southgate, V. (2014). Infants learn what they want to learn: responding to infant pointing leads to superior learning. PloS one 9, e108817.Google Scholar
Blake, J., McConnell, S., Horton, G. & Benson, N. (1992). The gestural repertoire and its evolution over the second year. Early Development and Parenting 1, 127–36.Google Scholar
Bloom, K., Russell, A. & Wassenberg, K. (1987). Turn taking affects the quality of infant vocalizations. Journal of Child Language 14, 211–27.Google Scholar
Boersma, P. & Weenink, D. (2014). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 5·3·76, retrieved 8 May 2014 from <http://www.praat.org/>..>Google Scholar
Bonneh, Y. S., Levanon, Y., Dean-Pardo, O., Lossos, L. & Adini, Y. (2011). Abnormal speech spectrum and increased pitch variability in young autistic children. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 4(237), 1–7.Google Scholar
Butcher, C. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2000). Gesture and the transition from one- to two-word speech: when hand and mouth come together. In: McNeill, D. (ed.), Language and gesture, (pp. 235–258). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Camaioni, L., Castelli, M. C., Longobardi, E. & Volterra, V. (1991). A parent report instrument for early language assessment. First Language 11, 345–59.Google Scholar
Camp, B. W., Burgess, D., Morgan, L. J. & Zerbe, G. (1987). A longitudinal study of infant vocalization in the first year. Journal of Pediatric Psychology 12, 321–31.Google Scholar
Capirci, O., Contaldo, A., Caselli, M. C. & Volterra, V. (2005). From action to language through gesture: a longitudinal perspective. Gesture 5, 155–77.Google Scholar
Carpenter, M., Nagell, K. & Tomasello, M. (1998). Social cognition, joint attention, and communicative competence from 9 to 15 months of age. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 63, 1–174.Google Scholar
Cartmill, E. A., Hunsicker, D. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2014). Pointing and naming are not redundant: children use gesture to modify nouns before they modify nouns in speech. Developmental Psychology 50, 1660–1666.Google Scholar
Caselli, M. C., Rinaldi, P., Stefanini, S. & Volterra, V. (2012). Early action and gesture ‘vocabulary’ and its relation with word comprehension and production. Child Development 83, 526–42.Google Scholar
Cochet, H. & Vauclair, J. (2010a). Features of spontaneous pointing gestures in toddlers. Gesture 10, 86–107.Google Scholar
Cochet, H. & Vauclair, J. (2010b). Pointing gestures produced by toddlers from 15 to 30 months: different functions, hand shapes and laterality patterns. Infant Behavior and Development 33, 432–42.Google Scholar
Colletta, J., Guidetti, M., Capirci, O., Cristilli, C., Demir, O. E., Kunene-Nicolas, R. N. & Levine, S. (2014). Effects of age and language on co-speech gesture production: an investigation of French, American, and Italian children's narratives. Journal of Child Language 42, 122–45.Google Scholar
Colonnesi, C., Stams, J. M., Koster, I. & Noom, M. J. (2010). The relation between pointing and language development: a meta-analysis. Developmental Review 30, 352–66.Google Scholar
DePaolis, R. A., Vihman, M. M. & Kunnari, S. (2008). Prosody in production at the onset of word use: a cross-linguistic study. Journal of Phonetics 36, 406–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ejiri, K. & Masataka, N. (2001). Co-occurrence of preverbal vocal behavior and motor action in early infancy. Developmental Science 4, 40–8.Google Scholar
Esteve-Gibert, N. & Prieto, P. (2013). Prosody signals the emergence of intentional communication in the first year of life: evidence from Catalan-babbling infants. Journal of Child Language 40, 919–44.Google Scholar
Esteve-Gibert, N. & Prieto, P. (2014). Infants temporally coordinate gesture–speech combinations before they produce their first words. Speech Communication 57, 301–16.Google Scholar
Fasolo, M. & D'Odorico, L. (2012). Gesture-plus-word combinations, transitional forms, and language development. Gesture 12, 1–15.Google Scholar
Fogel, A. & Hannan, T. E. (1985). Manual actions of nine- to fifteen-week-old human infants during face-to-face interaction with their mothers. Child Development 56, 1271–9.Google Scholar
Goldin-Meadow, S. & Butcher, C. (2003). Pointing toward two-word speech in young children. In Kita, S. (ed.), Pointing: where language, culture, and cognition meet, 85–107. New Jersey: LEA.Google Scholar
Gros-Louis, J., West, M. J., Goldstein, M. H. & King, A. P. (2006). Mothers provide differential feedback to infants’ prelinguistic sounds. International Journal of Behavioral Development 30, 509–16.Google Scholar
Gros-Louis, J., West, M. J. & King, A. P. (2014). Maternal responsiveness and the development of directed vocalizing in social interactions. Infancy 19, 385–408.Google Scholar
Gros-Louis, J. & Wu, Z. (2012). Twelve-month-olds’ vocal production during pointing in naturalistic interactions: sensitivity to parents’ attention and responses. Infant Behavior and Development 35, 773–8.Google Scholar
Grünloh, T. & Lizskowski, U. (in press). Prelinguistic vocalizations distinguish pointing acts. Journal of Child Language, online: <doi:10.1017/S0305000914000816>..>Google Scholar
Hsu, H., Fogel, A. & Cooper, R. B. (2000). Infant vocal development during the first 6 months: speech quality and melodic complexity. Infant and Child Development 9, 1–16.Google Scholar
Igualada, A., Bosch, L. & Prieto, P. (2015). Language development at 18 months is related to multimodal communicative strategies at 12 months. Infant Behavior and Development 39, 42–52.Google Scholar
Iverson, J. (2010). Developing language in a developing body: the relationship between motor development and language development. Journal of Child Language 37, 229–61.Google Scholar
Iverson, J. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2005). Gesture paves the way for language development. Psychological Science 16, 367–71.Google Scholar
Iverson, J. & Thelen, E. (1999). Hand, mouth and brain: the dynamic emergence of speech and gesture. Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, 19–40.Google Scholar
Karousou, A. & López-Ornat, S. (2013). Prespeech vocalizations and the emergence of speech: a study of 1005 Spanish children. Spanish Journal of Psychology 16, 1–21.Google Scholar
Keller, H. & Schölmerich, A. (1987). Infant vocalizations and parental reactions during the first 4 months of life. Developmental Psychology 23, 62–7.Google Scholar
Leung, E. H. & Rheingold, H. L. (1981). Development of pointing as a social gesture. Developmental Psychology 17, 215–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liszkowski, U. & Tomasello, M. (2011). Individual differences in social, cognitive, and morphological aspects of infant pointing. Cognitive Development 26, 16–29.Google Scholar
Majorano, M. & D'Odorico, L. (2011). The transition into ambient language: a longitudinal study of babbling and first word production of Italian children. First Language 31, 47–66.Google Scholar
Masataka, N. (1993a). Effects of contingent and noncontingent maternal stimulation on the vocal behaviour of three- to four-month-old Japanese infants. Journal of Child Language 20, 303–12.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Masataka, N. (1993b). Relation between pitch contour of prelinguistic vocalizations and communicative functions in Japanese infants. Infant Behavior & Development 16, 397–401.Google Scholar
Masataka, N. (1995). The relation between index-finger extension and the acoustic quality of cooing in three-month-old infants. Journal of Child Language 22, 247–57.Google Scholar
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and mind: what gestures reveal about thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Murillo, E. & Belinchón, M. (2012). Gestural–vocal coordination: longitudinal changes and predictive value on early lexical development. Gesture 12, 16–39.Google Scholar
Murillo, E. & Belinchón, M. (2013). Patrones comunicativos multimodales en la transición a las primeras palabras: cambios en la coordinación de gestos y vocalizaciones. [Multimodal communicative patterns on the transition to first words: changes in the coordination of gesture and vocalization]. Infancia y Aprendizaje 36, 473–87.Google Scholar
Oller, D. K., Niyogi, P., Gray, S., Richards, J. A., Gilkerson, J., Xu, D., Yapanel, U. & Warren, S. F. (2010). Automated vocal analysis of naturalistic recordings from children with autism, language delay, and typical development. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, 13354–59.Google Scholar
Olson, J. & Masur, E. F. (2013). Mothers respond differently to infants’ gestural versus nongestural communicative bids. First Language 33, 372–87.Google Scholar
Özçalışkan, Ş. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2005). Gesture is at the cutting edge of early language development. Cognition 96, 101–13.Google Scholar
Özçaliskan, S. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2009). When gesture–speech combinations do and do not index linguistic change. Language and Cognitive Processes 24, 190–217.Google Scholar
Papaeliou, C. F. & Trevarthen, C. (2006). Prelinguistic pitch patterns expressing ‘communication’ and ‘apprehension’. Journal of Child Language 33, 163–78.Google Scholar
Rodríguez, C. (2009). The ‘circumstances’ of gestures: proto-interrogatives and private gestures. New Ideas in Psychology 27, 288–303.Google Scholar
Rowe, M. L. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2009). Early gesture selectively predicts later language learning. Developmental Science 12, 182–7.Google Scholar
Rowe, M., Özçalişkan, Ş. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2008). Learning words by hand: gesture's role in predicting vocabulary development. First Language 28, 182–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Snow, D. & Balog, H. L. (2002). Do children produce the melody before the words? A review of developmental intonation research. Lingua 112, 1025–58.Google Scholar
Talkin, D. (1995). A Robust Algorithm for Pitch Tracking (RAPT). In Kleijn, W. B. & Paliwal, K. K. (eds), Speech coding & synthesis, (pp. 497–518). New York: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Thorson, J., Borras-Comes, J., Crespo-Sendra, V., Vanrell, M. & Prieto, P. (2015). The acquisition of melodic form and meaning in yes-no interrogatives by Catalan and Spanish speaking children. Probus 27, 73–99.Google Scholar
Vigliocco, G., Perniss, P. & Vinson, D. (2014). Language as a multimodal phenomenon: implications for language learning, processing and evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 369(1651), 20130292, 1–7.Google Scholar
Vihman, M. M., Ferguson, C. A. & Elbert, M. (1986). Phonological development from babbling to speech: common tendencies and individual differences. Applied Psycholinguistics 7, 3–40.Google Scholar
Wu, Z. & Gros-Louis, J. (2014). Infants’ prelinguistic communicative acts and maternal responses: relations to linguistic development. First Language 34, 72–90.Google Scholar