Getting to the Point: Examining Associations Between Adult Interactional Strategies and Infant Gestures

Abstract

The developmental importance of infant gesture use is well established, yet few investigations examine what adults can do to facilitate infant gestures. We used an event lag with pauses sequential analysis to generate an index of association between each adult interactional strategy and deictic infant gesture during ten-minute play interactions with 27 typically developing infants (11-25 months) and trained interventionists. We ran correlations to examine potential relationships between the sequential associations, child age, and language scores. Results indicated modeling gestures with a short phrase increased the momentary likelihood of infant gestures overall and points specifically, whereas modeling short phrases without gestures decreased the momentary likelihood of any infant gesture.

Keywords: gesture; interactional strategy; pointing; prelinguistic communication; sequential analysis.