We gesture while we talk and children use gestures prior to words to communicate during the first year. Later, as words become the preferred form of communication, children continue to gesture to reinforce or extend the spoken messages or even to replace them. This volume, originally published as a Special Issue of Gesture 10:2/3 (2010), brings together studies from language acquisition and developmental psychology. It provides a review of common theoretical, methodological and empirical themes, and the contributions address topics such as gesture use in prelinguistic infants with a special and new focus on pointing, the relationship between gestures and lexical development in typically developing and deaf children and even how gesture can help to learn mathematics. All in all, it brings additional evidence on how gestures are related to language, communication and mind development.
Editorial Reviews
Review
This collection of papers presents a wonderful and vast overview of contemporary research on gesture and multimodal development, representing multiple theoretical and applied perspectives. […] It constitutes a major contribution not only to the study of gestural and multimodal development, but also to the understanding of cognitive and communicative development in a more broad sense. — Olga Capirci, Head of “Gesture, Language and Developmental Disorders” Unit, ISTC – CNR, Rome, Italy
All of the articles in the book provide valuable insights into different aspects of the role of gesture and multimodality in children’s communicative and cognitive development. The book as a whole reflects the state of the art in this field of research and constitutes one among relatively few anthologies on this topic (e.g. Guidetti & Nicoladis, 2008; Gullberg & de Bot, 2010; Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 1998; Volterra & Erting,1990), which is valuable in itself. — Mats Andrén, Lund University, in First Language Vol. 34:3 (2014), pp. 1-3
Looking at a variety of languages, input conditions, and contexts of language use, these researchers demonstrate how language development is necessarily embodied and multimodal. These studies present exciting new insights into the dynamic relationships that are necessary for language development. — Elena Nicoladis, University of Alberta, Canada
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