Children’s pointing gestures from one to four. From deictic reference to the diversification of form and function

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 they 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 facilitates access to the referential function. However, pointing does not totally disappear with the emergence of vocal productions (Marcos 1998). Does it qualitatively evolve, as children grow older? What is the purpose of pointing after children can manipulate complex verbal productions to mark reference?This paper explores the evolution and diversification of pointing gestures in two longitudinal follow-ups of French speaking children with their caregivers between 10 months and 4 years old. We categorized all pointing gestures of the children and the adults in order to analyze their form and function from their “pre-linguistic” to their co-verbal uses, from deictic reference to diversified functions. According to our first results, even though the increase in the two children’s use of speech over pointing gestures is spectacular, the overall quantity of pointing gestures does not decrease in our one-hour sessions. The formal components and functions of the two children’s pointing gestures diversify greatly over the course of the data. At first, pointing gestures used in isolation enable the children to attract the adult’s attention to an object present in the room. They can be interpreted as being either proto-declarative or proto-imperative. At around one year old, they are complemented by vocal productions. Around 1;06, pointing gestures are produced with deictics or nouns and clearly localize the objects shown or requested. The verbal productions simultaneous to pointing will then become more and more complex: first with predicates, then with whole utterances. At 2;00, a great transformation occurs, pointing can be totally decontextualized: the two children start pointing to absent entities. At 2;06, the two children point to several locations during narratives, enacting absent entities and placing them in the interlocutory space. From 3;00 to the end of the data, they start using pointing gestures with a whole range of diversified functions. They refer to time-spans, they indicate spatial limits or are used to modalize by attenuating or suspending the predication children are making in speech. Interestingly enough, in parallel, at the beginning of the data, very often, when the target object is out of reach, the children move towards it and create a concrete link by touching or handling it. They later refer to present objects without moving towards them by extending their arm and index in their direction. Finally they will also refer to absent or fictive objects. Thanks to the development of their motor, cognitive and representational skills, the two children progressively use more precise and formally complex as well as diversified pointing gestures that do not solely depend on the environmental context, that take on a variety of functions and are subtly connected to the ongoing dialogue