ORCID
- Caroline Floccia: 0000-0003-3931-9791
- Allegra Cattani: 0000-0003-3399-1368
Abstract
We report on an analysis of spontaneous gesture production in 2-year-old children who come from three countries (Italy, United Kingdom, Australia) and who speak two languages (Italian, English), in an attempt to tease apart the influence of language and culture when comparing children from different cultural and linguistic environments. Eighty-seven monolingual children aged 24–30 months completed an experimental task measuring their comprehension and production of nouns and predicates. The Italian children scored significantly higher than the other groups on all lexical measures. With regard to gestures, British children produced significantly fewer pointing and speech combinations compared to Italian and Australian children, who did not differ from each other. In contrast, Italian children produced significantly more representational gestures than the other two groups. We conclude that spoken language development is primarily influenced by the input language over gesture production, whereas the combination of cultural and language environments affects gesture production.
DOI
10.1111/lang.12346
Publication Date
2019-05-02
Publication Title
Language Learning
Volume
69
Issue
3
ISSN
0023-8333
Keywords
crosscultural, crosslinguistic, language development, lexicon, pointing gesture, representational gesture
First Page
709
Last Page
746
Recommended Citation
Cattani, A., Floccia, C., Kidd, E., Pettenati, P., Onofrio, D., & Volterra, V. (2019) 'Gestures and Words in Naming: Evidence From Crosslinguistic and Crosscultural Comparison', Language Learning, 69(3), pp. 709-746. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12346
