A Longitudinal Case Study on the Relationship between Early Gestures and Lexical Development

It has been suggested that children who are early or frequent users of gestures also develop expressive language at an early age. This assumption has been questioned on the grounds that studies performed under controlled laboratory conditions in which gestures are elicited in the absence of contextual support (e.g. in relation to a new object) have shown to correlate positively to vocabulary size, while parent observations of gestural behavior performed with associated objects in naturalistic settings have not. The current longitudinal case study of infants’ early gestural and linguistic development is based on parent reports collected by the standardized Swedish analog of MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (CDI). Results showed that a positive correlation between frequency of use of early gestures and vocabulary size could be found for a subset of subjects.