Hearing children's use of pointing gestures: from pre-linguistic buds to the blossoming of communication skills

International audienceAmong the conventional gestures which appear early in children's development, pointing is observed between 9 and 12 months, shortly before first words. For Clark (1978), the first vocal demonstratives used by children follow pointing as children shift rather fluidly from pre-linguistic to linguistic communication in a sequence of stages from pointing to deictics and lexical words. According to this perspective, pointing corresponds to a transition in the course of acquisition and facilitates access to combinations and early syntax (Bates et al. 1977). However, gestural communication does not totally disappear with the emergence of vocal productions (Marcos 1998). Furthermore, it is still largely used by adults themselves in combination with vocal productions (Guidetti 1998). This paper explores the evolution and fate of pointing gestures in two longitudinal follow-ups of French speaking children between 11 months and 4 years old and their care-takers. Our analyses of the data show that vocal and gestural modalities are associated and complement each other from the very onset of pointing. We categorized all pointing gestures of the children and the adults in order to analyze their functions from their "pre-linguistic" to their co-verbal uses. The two children use more pointing gestures when their MLU is below 2,5, but they still produce an important number of pointing gestures at four when their MLU is above 5 with particular functions similar to those used by the adults and some creative specific uses. Pointing gestures are therefore still functional and continue to enhance the blossoming of their communication skills