Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Psychology Infant Language Development Infant Language Development The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effect on verbal language development of purposefully encouraging hearing infants to use simple gestures as symbols for objects, requests, and conditions. To this end 103, 11-month-old infants were divided into three groups, all of whom were seen in the laboratory for a variety of assessments, including standardized language tests at 15, 19, 24, 30, and 36 months. Parents of those in the Sign Training group modelled symbolic gestures and encouraged their infants to use them. Parents of infants in the Non-intervention Control group knew nothing about symbolic gestures or our special interest in language development. As a control for "training effects" (i.e., effects attributable to families being engaged in a language intervention program), parents of a second control group of infants (the Verbal Training group) were asked to make special efforts to model verbal labels. After comparisons of the two control groups minimized concerns about training effects, comparisons between the Sign Training and the Non-intervention Control group indicated an advantage for the Sign Training group on the vast majority of language acquisition measures. These results provide strong evidence that symbolic gesturing does not hamper verbal development and may even facilitate it. A variety of possible explanations for such an effect are discussed. Impact of Symbolic Gesturing on Early Language Development A view of the child as a preformed adult endowed with special linguistic input and output devices is giving way to a view of the child as a creature equipped with ears and eyes and with various moving parts that can be harnessed to form the sounds and sights of its species communicative signals (Studdert-Kennedy, 1991, p. 89) For many years the phrase "language development" was used almost exclusively in reference to the development of verbal language. A child's first words were touted by parents and researchers alike as marking the onset of the ability to represent concepts symbolically and use symbols for the express purpose of communicating with others. More recently, based in part on increasing appreciation of the ground-breaking theoretical work of Werner and Kaplan (1963), researchers have taken a closer look at the precursors of verbal language with an eye toward delineating the steps by which children gradually become proficient in using arbitrary symbols to stand for real-world phenomena. One of their most thought-provoking ideas is the notion that the development of representational ability requires children to tolerate greater and greater "distancing" of the symbol from the referent. For example, the use of an onomatopoetic symbol (e.g., "woof") to symbolize the sound that dogs make is not quite as "distant" from the referent as the more arbitrary symbol, "barking." The latter makes greater cognitive demands on the child because the relationship must be maintained mentally without support from the environment. As interest in subtle milestones of language development has grown, including the notion of "distancing" of symbol from referent, so also has interest in the role of physical actions including a variety of kinds of gestures. Such a focus, researchers point out, makes a good deal of sense given the prominence of sensorimotor schemes (i.e., actions on objects) during the first year of life. For example, the onset of intentional communication is signalled by a small set of gestures, which essentially launch the child into purposefully communicating with others. These "performatives" or "deictic" gestures as they are variously called, begin around 10 months of age and include such actions as effortful reaching towards objects to indicate that they are wanted, directing adult attention to objects by holding them up or giving them, and pointing at objects to indicate interest or need (Bates, Benigni, Bretherton, Camaioni, & Volterra, 1979, Messinger & Fogel, 1998). These early intentional gestures, although clearly an advance over merely acting on objects, are still primitive in terms of their representational sophistication. In each case the referential meaning is clear only if the viewer follows the gesture’s trajectory to its target. Despite their primitive representational stature, however, there is no doubt these gestures constitute an important early step in symbolic development and pave the way for learning verbal language. Jumping ahead developmentally, another important milestone in the development of communicative gestures has been found during the 3- to 5-year-old period. Researchers from a number of laboratories (e.g., Boyatzis & Watson, 1993; O’Reilly, 1995) have documented a change across this developmental time span in how children choose to represent an action in pantomime, such as brushing one’s teeth or writing with a pencil. At the younger end of this age range the data indicate a strong tendency to depend on a body part to represent the tool itself Participants included 103 infants (58 boys, 45 girls) from a predominantly middle-class area of Northern California. Entry into the study was at 11 months (+/- 1 week). Infants routinely exposed to a language other than English or who had had more than five ear infections were excluded. Income level data confirmed a middle-income status for the majority of the families, with only 15% of the sample falling below $20,000. Participants were almost exclusively Caucasian (90%), the only exceptions being three African-American, seven Asian American, and five Hispanic children. Participant groups. The two primary groups included in the study were an experimental group, designated the Sign Training group (n = 32, 19 boys and 13 girls) and a control group, designated the Non-intervention Control group (n = 39, 22 boys and 17 girls). Parents of infants in the Sign Training group (ST group) were individually instructed in ways to promote symbolic gesturing by modeling simple gestures themselves, always being sure to pair the gesture with the verbal word (e.g., "Birdie! [FLAP ARMS] See the birdie!"). They were told to use any physical motions that made sense to them and would be easy to remember in relation to the referent (e.g., clawing motion for cat, index finger wiggling for caterpillar). Videotaped examples of parents and infants using such gestures were used as illustration. In contrast, parents in the Non-intervention Control group (NC) were not involved in training of any sort, nor were they aware of our special interest in language. Inclusion of this particular control group allowed direct comparison of infants who had used. To determine if the independent variable had in fact been manipulated, initial analyses focused on whether the infants in the Sign Training group had acquired any symbolic gestures. The data relevant to this question came from the biweekly phone calls to the ST families during which parents described the contexts in which their infants used gestures to communicate concepts. The criteria used to determine when a gesture qualified as a "generalized symbol" were very similar to those used to assign symbolic status to infant gestures in Acredolo and Goodwyn (1988) and identical to those used for both gestures and words in Goodwyn and Acredolo (1993). Salient among these criteria were the following: (a) spontaneous usage by the child (i.e., not following direct modeling or elicitation), (b) occurrence in a stereotyped form, and (c) use in reference to multiple exemplars of the underlying concept beyond the specific context in which the item was initially taught. For example, use of a panting gesture for "dog" had to be extended beyond labelling just the family dog, and use of a gesture for "more" had to be extended beyond a particular routine such as asking for more cookies. The overall goal was to determine when gestures were, in Snyder, Bates, and Bretherton’s (1981) terms, "context-flexible." The application of the rules described above was initially done by one coder. A second coder reviewed the interviews for 10% of the subjects. Inter-coder reliability was determined by calculating the number of agreements (i.e., both coders agreed on the interview date during which a specific gesture reached "generalized" status) divided by the number of agreements plus disagreements. Inter-coder reliability was 92%. The three universally acquired symbolic gestures, "bye The results of the present study, particularly the comparisons between the Sign Training group and the Non-intervention Control group, strongly support the hypothesis that symbolic gesturing facilitates the early stages of verbal language development. In a significant proportion of the comparisons between these two groups, infants who augmented their fledgling vocal vocabularies with symbolic gestures outperformed those who did not. The fact that no such advantage was found for the infants in the Verbal Training group provides reassuring evidence that the superior performance of the ST infants was not simply a function of their families being involved in a language-centered intervention program. The explanation seems to lie instead within the gesturing experience itself. Increases in infant-directed speech. Among the most well documented factors affecting the rate at which language is acquired is the sheer amount of vocalization directed to the child (Huttenlocher, Haight, Bryk, Seltzer, & Lyons, 1991). One clue, therefore, to why symbolic gesturing is associated with more rapid verbal language development may lie in the way adults tend to respond to an infant who uses a symbolic gesture. As is true of early words as well, the use of a symbolic gesture to label an object or to make a request seems to "pull" language from caregivers as they acknowledge the infant's message or even elaborate on it: "Birdie? That's right! That is a birdie! Oh, there it goes flying away. Bye-bye birdie!" It follows, then, that the more things an infant can and does talk about, the more vocal language the infant will hear in return. Because symbolic gestures tend to be acquired more easily and at earlier ages than their verbal counterparts (Acredolo & Goodwyn, 1992; Goodwyn & Acredolo, 1993, 1998), infants with symbolic gestures in their communicative repertoires gain the benefits of such caregiver responses at earlier ages as well. In other words, a 14-month-old with a 10 word and 10 symbolic gesture vocabulary can elicit caregiver responses to twice as many different things as he or she could without the additional gestural symbols. In addition, it seems quite likely that caregivers who are purposefully encouraging symbolic gesturing by modeling them will be especially vigilant about acknowledging and reinforcing any attempts their baby makes to use them, thereby rarely missing an opportunity to flood the child with relevant vocal language. Topic selection. A second factor known to contribute to faster rates of verbal language development is the degree to which the infant or toddler, rather than the parent, controls the topic around which joint attention episodes are organized. The classic demonstration of this relationship was provided in a study by Tomasello and Farrar (1986) in which the use of object names by mothers to refer to objects upon which the child was already focused was positively correlated with later vocabulary size. The explanation for this is obvious. Just as we all do, infants tend to pay better attention to things in which they are genuinely interested, as opposed to things in which others think they should be interested. For example, a toddler at the zoo whose attention is riveted on birds hopping around underneath the elephant is not going to learn much that is useful from a parent who is conscientiously labelling the elephant over and over again! By increasing the number of labels the infant can produce spontaneously, a symbolic gesturing repertoire automatically increases the chance that parents will figure out what it is that the baby wants to talk about and shift their own focus to match. A shared focus, in turn, makes it much more likely that the vocal information the parent provides will make a lasting impression. The power of "scaffolding." As typically used when researchers describe Vygotsky’s (1978) social-cultural theory of cognitive development, the term "scaffolding" refers to guidance provided by adults that narrows the gap between a child’s level of ability and the demands of a complex task (Wood, Bruner, & Ross, 1976). The goal is to increase the chance of the child succeeding by making the task a bit easier in some way. A good example occurs when adults help toddlers put together their first puzzles by giving them pieces already oriented in the right direction, or when mothers position babies facing them in order to introduce "roll the ball" or "peekaboo" games (Hodapp, Goldfield, & Boyatzis, 1984). In each case the children gain insights that help them learn their roles in these interactions, thus making future puzzles and games easier. We suggest that there are several forms of scaffolding at work in the symbolic gesturing effect on verbal development. At a global level, by providing a way around the obstacle posed by the intricacies of spoken words, parents who encourage symbolic gesturing are enabling their toddlers to learn how valuable language can be. This knowledge, in turn, motivates the toddlers to explore all forms of communication – including the more demanding modality of spoken words. Just as learning to crawl increases rather than decreases a child’s motivation to walk, use of gestures increases rather than decreases the child’s 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 father’s attention to dogs barking outside, airplanes flying behind the clouds, or even sounds she can’t 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. With 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 symbolic function as it applies to language. For these children, at least, the problem is clearly with the articulatory piece of the language puzzle. (See Acredolo, Goodwyn, Horobin, & Emmons, 1999, for other examples.) Although the composite effect of the symbolic gesturing experience on verbal language was positive across the span of the present study, age-by-age analyses indicated more statistically significant effects early on. By the 36-month comparisons, the ST children were ahead of the controls, but not significantly so. Given that significant positive effects do not appear to last, one might wonder why parents should even bother with symbolic gesturing. The answer is clear to anyone who has lived with a toddler. The period after infants become mobile and before they can talk is a very difficult one for both parents and children. As the parents in the Sign Training group told us over and over again, the availability of symbolic gestures for at least some of the important things in their child’s life made communication easier and interactions more positive. Request gestures (e.g., MORE, OUT) helped children get their needs met without crying, symbols for specific foods (e.g., GOLDFISH CRACKERS, CHEERIOS) provided important clarification, animal gestures (e.g., MONKEY, ZEBRA, GIRAFFE) helped them become active partners during book-reading, descriptive gestures (e.g., HOT, HAPPY, AFRAID) helped them share important insights about their environment, and all of the gestures helped clarify the children’s initial, crude verbal labels (e.g., "Oh! You’re doing your TURTLE gesture. I guess Tata means "turtle!"). Here are just a few additional examples: 1. A 16-month-old, who awoke crying in the night, was able to point and use his "afraid" gesture (patting his chest) to let his mother know he was afraid of the clown doll on his dresser. Without the gesture, she might have put the doll in bed with him! 2. A 13-month-old excitedly produced his "crocodile" gesture while being strolled through the shopping mall. Mom let him out of the stroller and he toddled back to the store they had just passed and pointed to the Izod insignias on the racks of men’s shirts. 3. A 14-month-old was able to use his "hot" gesture (blowing hard) to let his mother know when food was too hot, when his bath water was too hot, and even when the sidewalk at the pool was too hot. Even these few examples provide tantalizing clues about the ways symbolic gesturing can facilitate and enrich interactions between parent and child. Clearly, our next challenge will be to systematically explore the socio-emotional effects of the gesturing experience. In the meantime, the good news from the present study is that parents need not worry about jeopardizing their child’s vocal language development in order to take advantage of this easy alternative to words. In fact, these data demonstrate clearly that the symbolic gesturing experience seems to "jump start" verbal development. There is no reason, therefore, for parents not to simply relax and enjoy any and all symbolic gestures their baby acquires. Bibliography: McIntyre11 Work Cited Acredolo, L. P., & Goodwyn, S. W. (1985). Symbolic gesturing in language development: A case study. Human Development, 28, 40-49. Acredolo, L. P., & Goodwyn, S. W. (1988). Symbolic gesturing in normal infants. Child Development, 59, 450-466. Acredolo, L. P., & Goodwyn, S. W. (1990). Sign language in babies: The significance of symbolic gesturing for understanding language development. In R. Vasta (Ed.), Annals of Child Development, Vol. 7 (pp. 1-42). London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Acredolo, L. P., & Goodwyn, S. W. (1992, April). Infant symbolic acquisition in two modalities. Paper presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies, Miami, FL. Acredolo, L. P., Goodwyn, S. W., Horobin, K. D., & Emmons, Y. D. (1999). The signs and sounds of early language development. In C. Tamis-LeMonda & L. Balter (Eds.), Child psychology: A handbook of contemporary issues (pp. 116-142). New York: Psychology Press. Bates, E., Benigni, L. Bretherton, I., Camaioni, L., & Volterra, V. (1979). The emergence of symbols: Cognition and communication in infancy. New York: Academic Press. Bates, E., Bretherton, I., & Snyder, L. (1988). From first words to grammar: Individual differences and dissociable mechanisms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyatzis, C. J., & Watson, M. W. (1993). Preschool children’s symbolic representation of objects through gestures. Child Development, 64, 729-735. Diamond, M. & Hopson, J. (1998). Magic trees of the mind. New York: Dutton. Fenson, L., Dale, P. S., Reznick, J. S., Thal, D., Bates, E., Hartung, J. P., Pethick, S. T., & Reilly, J. S. (1993). The MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (CDI). San Diego, CA: Singular Publishing Group, Inc. Gardner, M. F. (1985). Receptive and Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test. Novato, CA: Academic Therapy Publications. Tomasello, M., & Farrar, J. (1986). Joint attention and early language. Child Development, 57, 1454-1463. Word Count: 2987
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