Referentiality is a core property of language that allows us to refer to entities or events. While evidence that captive apes communicate referentially by pointing is well-established, evidence in the wild remains scarce. The chapter suggests that the near absence of referential gesturing in wild apes may result in part from an anthropogenic bias and overabundance of caution in determining what constitutes reference for apes. A framework is presented to explore potentially referential gestures more generously – considering gestures whose form resembles the physical form, direction, or target of the recipient’s desired behavioural reaction. The chapter applies the framework to a gestural dataset from a chimpanzee community in which four possible cases of pointing were previously detected (<0.001 per cent) and found that ~18 per cent of gestures contained potential directional information. Taking a broader perspective when examining referential information in chimpanzee gestural communication may help us get to the point of ape reference.

This chapter examines the relationship between ape pointing and recipient attention, an under-explored aspect of primate communication. It is argued that an overly narrow interpretation of the imperative–declarative distinction has led researchers to overlook the attention-directing role of ape pointing. The chapter reviews evidence of attention manipulation in apes and analyses pointing studies for insights into how apes engage with the gaze of others. It is proposed that apes may point with the goal of directing attention, even when intertwined with other motives such as requesting. This chapter provides a framework for future research to explore the complex interplay between pointing and attention in great apes, contributing to our understanding of the evolution of communication and social cognition.

This chapter discusses the roles and functions of pointing in caring for preverbal children primarily in Western cultures seeking to raise verbally expressive, independent children. The chapter describes how preverbal children can use pointing to elicit sensitive and responsive care from caregivers, therefore supporting developmental outcomes in many domains (language, social, cognitive). It examines pointing within cultural contexts in which it occurs most, contrasting Western caregiving (distal style, prioritizing object labeling) with non-Western cultures (proximal style, favoring tactile interactions). The chapter underscores the necessity to extend research on infants’ pointing beyond the lab to capture caregiver–child interactions in real-world settings, providing an ecologically valid perspective on gestures in children’s everyday lives. It argues for an inclusive research approach that explores infant pointing beyond Western cultures, which so far dominate the literature on this topic.

The comprehension of pointing gestures extends beyond humans, with various species showing an ability to interpret such cues. Domestication and/or experience with humans have likely influenced this ability, although the evidence focuses primarily on canids rather than other domestic species. This chapter highlights current research on the use of human pointing and other social cues in domestic animals, particularly horses, goats and pigs. However, studies in other taxa and species, such as cattle or poultry, are scarce. The chapter also addresses future challenges in the field, including the need for improved comparability of data through a comparative approach and the development of more sophisticated task designs to elucidate the cognitive mechanisms involved in solving such tasks.

Previous discussions of pointing have largely evaded a central question: How is an act of pointing recognized as communicative in the first place? Here it is argued – building on classic and recent work in pragmatics – that pointing is designed to deviate minimally from mere attending. This basic design is found throughout the diverse universe of human pointing, from the most familiar, conventional forms to the most exotic and ad hoc, and may even extend to cases of pointing in nonhuman animals. Further, the chapter shows that this framework lights up promising avenues for further research on the interpretation of pointing, as well as on the emergence of pointing on developmental, cultural, and evolutionary timescales.

The three editors provide an overview of the book where they describe key issues, summarize progress since Sotaro Kita’s (2004) edited volume on pointing, and situating each contributor(s)’ chapter within the context of the book.

Language is the primary mode of communication for humans. However, nonverbal communication, such as gestures, eye contact, and facial expressions, also play a crucial role. In some cases, these nonverbal forms are even more important than spoken language. For example, pointing is a social behavior observed from early infancy and is documented not only in humans but also in other primates like chimpanzees. This chapter explores how Artificial Intelligence can offer a unique perspective on pointing.

Pointing, and the joint attention between agents that it establishes, play a foundational role in human communication and cooperation. How this capacity emerges is therefore a central question for our understanding of human development and evolution. Here we face two mysteries. The first is where does pointing come from. There are many candidates in early infancy that could be precursors of pointing – including reaching, touching, and copying others. The second is how does pointing support infants’ understanding of others’ communicative intentions, which seems, paradoxically, to develop after pointing has emerged. This chapter argues that some automatic aspects of human behaviour – namely touch exploration in infants, and adults’ automatic tendency to look at what they touch – lead to early pointing behaviour. This process does not initially require either the infant or the adult to infer each other’s intentions, providing a cognitively lean account of pointing. Once this behaviour begins, it sets up a ‘joint attention triangle’ between agents that provides a natural platform for our understanding of others’ communicative intentions to develop.

Pointing, for humans, is a communicative act – we intend to share information with one another by pointing. The intentional nature of ape pointing has been questioned, but a substantial set of data show that apes in communicative contexts alter their behavior with audience and attentional variables, indicating intentional communication. In contrast, the comprehension (receiving and understanding the information) of the point gesture in apes and other nonhumans has most often been tested using object choice task (OCT), an artificial experimental task removed from typical communicative contexts. This recent preoccupation with nonhuman point following has been fueled, in part, by the claim that dogs perform well at these tasks and apes do not. This claim, in turn, was built on the assumption that the OCT requires the understanding of the communicative nature of the point gesture – specifically it requires understanding the signaler’s intent to communicate – an assumption not backed up by historical or recent data. The chapter presents a review and a case study supporting three hypotheses: 1) Apes and dogs follow points quite well in the OCT if simple associative mechanisms like local enhancement can be used to solve the problem; 2) Some apes and dogs may understand the communicative intent underlying point gestures, however, these are the minority and likely require enriched environments; and 3) Methodologies and interpretations must be continuously and critically evaluated, especially when drawing species comparisons.

In humans, clinical and experimental research has demonstrated that language is lateralized to the left hemisphere. The evolutionary precursors and factors that selected for language lateralization have been the topic of considerable scientific debate. The chapter summarizes evidence that the emergence of left hemisphere dominance for language may lie in in the use of gestural communication by chimpanzees and other great apes. One section focuses on behavioral studies that have examined lateralization in the production and use of manual and oro-facial gestures. A second section focuses on the neuroanatomical substrates for language evident in the chimpanzee brain and their association with lateralization for different, multimodal communicative behaviors. The chapter summarize the collective findings by discussing some limitations in their interpretation and by suggesting direction for future research.

In contrast to great apes, gestural communication including hand and body gestures has been poorly investigated in monkeys. In the last twenty years in the studied group, the research conducted into the baboons (Papio anubis) housed in social groups at the Station de Primatologie CNRS (South of France), has reported some key properties of language such as intentionality, learning flexibility as well as the underlying lateralization and hemispheric specialization of the brain. This chapter also addresses specifically the question of referential properties of some gestures in baboons. These latter researches suggest that some individuals are not only able to learn to point “imperatively” to request food but also “declaratively” to show object within mother–infant interaction. According to these collective findings, which are congruent with the ones reported in great apes, it is thus not excluded that features of gestural communication shared between humans, great apes and baboons, may have played a critical role in the phylogenetic roots of language and dated back, not to the Hominidae evolution, but rather to their much older catarrhine common ancestor 25–40 million years ago.

This chapter explores the role of pointing when referring to (non-)local places in everyday conversations conducted in Gija, an endangered Australian Aboriginal language from the East Kimberley, Western Australia. Conversation analytic methods are supplemented by a geospatial approach, which provides a procedure for measuring the angular vectors of pointing gestures and positioning them in ‘real space’. Analyses suggest that pointing is implicated in displays of detailed geographical knowledge and knowledge of recipients’ cultural connections to country. These types of bodily and verbal displays are fitted to recounting events that transpired on local Gija country. This level of detail is not required for events that occurred in nonlocal environments. This chapter aims to expand understandings of pointing as tied to the wider ecology of speakers’ cultural and communicative contexts, and, for these speakers of Gija, as grounded in displays of knowledge of country and land associations.

The Object Choice Task (OCT) is widely used to assess an individual or group’s ability to comprehend human deictic cues, most commonly, pointing cues. Since its inception in the 1990s, findings from OCT studies have been used as the basis for claims about species-wide capacities in understanding human communicative gestures, and for the proliferation of theories regarding their phylogenetic histories. However, the extent to which such theories can be supported by the data on which they stand is questionable due to a number of procedural and methodological inconsistencies in cross-species applications of the OCT. This chapter reviews the findings of OCT studies, with a particular focus on nonhuman primates and domestic dogs, discusses the systematic inconsistencies in sampling and procedural aspects of the OCT across the literature, and emphasizes the necessity for improved testing and reporting in the conducting of OCT studies.

The chapter addresses: 1. Overview of the Visual Signaling Principle. 2. Theoretical Rationale for the Visual Signaling Principle. 3. Empirical Rationale for the Visual Signaling Principle. 4. Boundary Conditions for the Visual Signaling Principle. 5. Applications of the Visual Signaling Principle

The third chapter of this guide to improving your BSL focuses predominantly on use of the signing space around the body, and pays particular attention to improving your use of pointing, perspective and collocation. Section 3.1 provides detailed explanation of the way that interlocutors make reference to many different things during a conversation and explains that this act of referencing (or pointing) in this way is called ‘deixis’. Several types of deixis are illustrated, along with following discussion of how correct use of perspective and collocation are important. The following section, 3.2, provides examples of common errors made in relation to pronominal and temporal deixis and how to correct them. This includes explanation of the typical perspective and collocation errors that are made when learners overuse the signing space. Sections 3.3 and 3.4 provide exercises that a BSL learner can do to improve use of pointing and to enhance awareness of the perspectives that are evoked when the signing space is used correctly.

This chapter gives an overview of the relation between indexicality, deixis, and space in gesture from a semiotic and a linguistic point of view. Directive pointing gestures are not the only type of cospeech gestures that contributes to deixis. Iconic gestures that form part of the multimodal utterance may instantiate the targets to be pointed at and function as the deictic object of the deictic relation. In turn they may be interpreted as signs that stand for something else. A Peircean approach combined with a Bühlerian one, as suggested in this chapter, not only allows for a tertium comparationis with respect to the modality of the deictic and indexical signs under investigation. It also provides us with tools for representing semiotic processes like complex sign concatenation (e.g. deixis at signs vs. deixis at non-signs; deixis at metonymies or metaphors) as well as the collaborative creation of deictic space (sphere-like, map-like, screen-like; separated or shared) in multimodal interaction. The proposed schema of four semiotic subfields of space substantiates the view that space has to be thought of as a dynamic process of semiosis, not as a static entity.

This chapter presents the role and use of gesture in first language development and its integration in the child’s multimodal communicative system. It includes an overview of theories and methods that have triggered and facilitated the study of gestures in language development. The main issues are illustrated with detailed analyses of examples extracted from longitudinal data in English and French. The human communication system develops in a space of shared meanings in which adults socialize children into language in situated activities; consequently, this overview highlights the crucial role of caregivers in child–adult interactions. We first focus on the role of gestures in adults’ communicative input and then follow children’s development into the use of the adults’ multimodal communicative system. At the end of the developmental process, speech becomes clearly predominant but is both complemented and supplemented by other semiotic resources according to variables such as linguistic context, situation, interlocutor, activity, or discourse genre. Children learn to master the dynamic multimodal communicative system used around them and with them in their daily interactions.

Gesture is a powerful tool for learning. Gestures reflect a learner’s knowledge and also have the power to change that knowledge. But how early does this ability develop and how might it change over time? Here we discuss the effects of gesture on learning, taking a developmental perspective. We compare how young learners benefit from gesture prior to developing full language skills, as well as how gesture and language work together to support instruction in older children. For both developmental stages, we explore three ways in which gesture can influence learning: (1) by indexing or reflecting a learner’s knowledge, (2) by changing that knowledge through the gestures that learners themselves produce, and (3) by changing that knowledge through the gestures that learners see. Taken together, the evidence suggests that gesture plays a powerful role in learning and education throughout development.