During the first eighteen months of life, infants acquire and refine a whole set of new motor skills that significantly change the ways in which the body moves in and interacts with the environment. In this review article, I argue that motor acquisitions provide infants with an opportunity to practice skills relevant to language acquisition before they are needed for that purpose; and that the emergence of new motor skills changes infants' experience with objects and people in ways that are relevant for both general communicative development and the acquisition of language. Implications of this perspective for current views of co-occurring language and motor impairments and for methodology in the field of child language research are also considered.

This study explores the communicative use of the gestural and vocal modalities by normally developing Italian children during the transition from one- to two-word speech. We analysed the spontaneous production of 12 children at 1;4 and at 1;8, focusing on the use of two-element combinations of words and/or gestures. Results indicated that use of gesture and gesture-word combinations during the transition to two-word speech is a robust feature of communicative development across a relatively large number of children in a rich gestural culture, and that the number of gesture-word and two-word combinations increased significantly from 1;4 to 1;8. Number of gestures and gesture-word combinations produced at 1;4 was also predictive of total vocal production at 1;8. Findings are discussed in terms of the role of gesture as a transitional device en route to two-word speech.

The evolutionary scenario described in this target article parallels developmental patterns observed in human infants. Early vocalizations are largely expressive, manual control develops more rapidly than intentional vocal articulation, and vocal and manual activity are linked. In ontogenetic development, language is strongly rooted in bodily action and gesture.

The aim of the present study was to examine potential effects of early exposure to sign language on the use of communicative gestures by a bilingual hearing child of deaf parents. Data collected monthly during the first two years were analyzed in order to identify types and tokens of communicative gestures, words, and signs and the ways in which they were combined. These data are compared with those obtained from 12 monolingual hearing children observed at 16 and 20 months of age who were exposed only to spoken language. Findings suggest that while exposure to sign language does not seem to provide the bilingual child with an advantage in the rate of early linguistic development, it does appear to influence the extent to which he communicated in the manual modality and made use of its representational and combinatorial potential.