Relationship Between Gestures and Vocabulary in 14-Month-Old Swedish-Learning Children.

Abstract

In this study, the relationship between gestures and vocabulary size in 177 Swedish-learning 14-month-old children was examined. Gesture use, receptive, and expressive vocabulary were reported by caregivers with the Swedish version of the MacArthur Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory, words and gestures, SECDI-1. Gesture types examined were referential gestures classified as either deictic gestures, conventional gestures, and object actions. A fine-grained analysis of gestures and lexicon was performed. Results show that percentage of gestures used by children significantly predicts percentage of words in their receptive vocabulary. However, looking at gesture type, only use of object actions significantly predicts percentage of words in the receptive vocabulary whereas use of conventional gestures does not. Deictic gestures showed a ceiling effect and were therefore not further used for analysis. The relationship between gesture use and vocabulary size was not impacted by semantic category (food or clothes). Vocabulary in both semantic categories was statistically predicted by object actions in only one semantic category.