Ontogenetic origins of infant pointing

Abstract

Human pointing is foundational to language acquisition and sociality. The current chapter explores the ontogenetic origins of the human pointing gesture in infancy. First, the authors define infant pointing in terms of function, cognition, motivation, and morphology. Then, the authors review current evidence for predictors of infant pointing on child and caregiver levels, because any predictors provide insights into the basic developmental factors. From this review, the authors introduce and discuss a number of pertinent accounts on the emergence of pointing: social shaping accounts (pointing-from-reaching; pointing-from-non-communicative pointing) and social cognition accounts (pointing-from-imitation; pointing-from-gaze-following). The authors end by presenting a synthesis, which holds that child-level cognitive factors, specifically directedness and social motivation, interact with caregiver-level social factors, specifically responsiveness and assisting actions relevant to infants’ directed activity. The interaction of these factors creates social goals and formats that scale up to pointing acts expressing triadic relations between infant, caregiver, and entities at a distance in the context of joint activity and experience.