Iconic number gestures: Naturalistic use by children and parents in the early home environment.

Abstract

A growing body of research suggests that children's use and understanding of cardinal number gestures (e.g., raising two fingers to indicate "two") reflect greater cardinal number knowledge than their number words alone (e.g., Butts, 2025; Gibson et al., 2019, 2022; Gunderson et al., 2015; Orrantia et al., 2024; Oswald et al., 2025). The present study adds to these findings by examining how often, and in what contexts, parents and their young children use iconic number gestures, with a particular focus on how these gestures are used in relation to number words. In a naturalistic, at-home longitudinal study, we found that 14- to 58-month-old children and their parents used iconic number gestures far less often than number words. Parents used more number words than the children, but children used more number gestures than the parents. Both children and parents used number gestures more often for nonpresent entities than for present entities, even though they both displayed the opposite pattern for number words (i.e., more number words for present than nonpresent entities). Finally, children were more likely to use number gestures if their parents used them (some parents never used number gestures during the observations), but neither parents' nor children's use of number gestures early on predicted children's cardinal number knowledge at 46 months of age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).