motivation to walk, use of gestures increases rather than decreases the childs motivation to talk.At a more subtle level, the symbolic gestures themselves constitute a "scaffold" by enabling children to gather information about the symbolic function in general and about the specific objects, events, and conditions that make up their world. The child with a symbolic gesture for flower, for example, learns that one entity (i.e., a movement) can stand for a very different entity (e.g., flower) for the purposes of communication. He or she also learns that buttercups and dandelions are flowers, but that broccoli is not. Similarly, the child with a gesture for "noise" can draw her fathers attention to dogs barking outside, airplanes flying behind the clouds, or even sounds she cant identify. As a result of day after day of mini-lessons like these -- all in advance of the words themselves -- misconceptions are corrected, concepts are honed, and everything is set for the verbal equivalent to slip right in as a label when it does become available. Without symbolic gestures, much of this conceptual work would be delayed, thus slowing down the whole language learning enterprise. McIntyre9Implications for ResearchersWith symbolic gestures in their arsenal of research tools, researchers now have a new window into the puzzle of language development. Why is it, for example, that infants have such a hard time building their early vocal vocabularies even after the arrival of one or two symbolic words? Symbolic gesturing provides a clue. When infants successfully use a gesture before they can say the corresponding word, they are revealing the fact that much of the underlying work of learning that word has already been done. They obviously understand the concept or category or condition the gesture stands for; they obviously recognize the string of sounds (when voiced by the parent) as equivalent to their gesture; and they obviously have figured out the ...
