Babies can say volume without saying a single word. They can wave good-bye, point at things to indicate an interest or shake their heads to mean “No”. These gestures may be very simple, but they are a sign of things to come. Year-old toddlers who use more gestures tend to have more expansive vocabularies several years later. And this link between early gesturing and future linguistic ability may partially explain by children from poorer families tend to have smaller vocabularies than those from richer ones.
Vocabulary size tallies strongly with a child’s academic success, so it’s striking that the lexical gap between rich and poor appears when children are still toddlers and can continue throughout their school life. What is it about a family’s socioeconomic status that so strongly affects their child’s linguistic fate at such an early age?
Obviously, spoken words are a factor. Affluent parents tend to spend more time talking to their kids and use more complicated sentences with a wider range of words. But Meredith Rowe and Susan Goldin-Meadow from the University of Chicago found that actions count too.
Children gesture before they learn to speak and previous studies have shown that even among children with similar spoken skills, those who gesture more frequently during early life tend to know more words later on. Rowe and Goldin-Meadow have shown that differences in gesturing can partly explain the social gradient in vocabulary size.
They studied the actions of 14-month-old babies from 50 local families of various backgrounds. They videotaped each baby engaging in ordinary activities with their parents for 90 minutes and noted every time they spoke or used gestures to communicate. Only actions with meanings counted – waving goodbye was a gesture, but opening a book was not. Rowe and Goldin-Meadow were particularly interested in how many different meanings they managed to convey through actions – for example, pointing at a dog meant “dog”.
At this early age, a child’s social background had no impact on how many words they could speak, but it did affect their use of gestures. Toddlers from richer families conveyed more meanings through gestures than those from poorer ones. Children typically start gesturing at about 10 months of age, so according to these results, it takes less than 4 months for a social gradient to develop. At that point, many babies haven’t started speaking and among those that have, there is no rich-poor gap in their use of words. But in more silent channels of communication, that gap is already evident.
It probably develops because richer parents gesture more extensively towards their children and indeed, children expressed more meanings through gestures if their parents did so to them. When Rowe and Goldin-Meadow adjusted for parental gesturing, the link between wealth and a child’s use of gestures was severely weakened.
These early differences had consequences later. A child’s “gesture vocabulary” at 14 months of age predicted the number of words they knew between the ages of four and five. And this link explained some but not all of the connection between wealth and vocabulary size.
Through gestures, children could give children a chance to familiarise themselves with certain meanings at a point when they don’t know how to represent them verbally. Alternatively, it’s possible that gestures build vocabulary indirectly, by prompting reactions from parents. A baby who points at a dog might get a “Yes, that’s a dog” from their mum. Indeed, Goldin-Meadow previously found that when mothers “translated” their child’s gestures into words, the child would incorporate those words into their vocabulary several months later. In a way, children “use their hands to tell their mothers what to say”.
Obviously, gestures aren’t the only thing explaining the link between social status and child vocabulary but Rowe and Goldin-Meyer’s work shows that they are important. It suggests that parents may be able to use their hands to improve their child’s later communication skills by, even before they can actually speak.
Reference: M. L. Rowe, S. Goldin-Meadow (2009). Differences in Early Gesture Explain SES Disparities in Child Vocabulary Size at School Entry Science, 323 (5916), 951-953 DOI: 10.1126/science.1167025
More on gestures:
- Gestures reveal universal word order, regardless of language
- Chimps show that actions spoke louder than words in language evolution
February 17th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
Interesting. I wonder if these results would hold true across cultures with varying degrees of gesturing in general. For example, I remember reading about a study awhile back (I’m pretty sure it was here on ScienceBlogs…Cognitive Daily maybe?) where they found that Italian babies (pretty sure it was Italians) had smaller vocabularies than American ones but gestured more…in simplistic terms. I wonder if they took that into account at all in this study?
February 17th, 2009 at 3:13 pm
Children can learn signing before they are able to use words. The results of the study in your post is consistent with longitudinal studies of signing toddlers, which also show better verbal language development subsequently. If community centres and outreach programs could teach moms, especially young moms, baby signing, that might help with the wealth disparity in learning language.
February 17th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
But why would richer parents/children gesticulate more? Because they have more objects at home to point at?
February 17th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
We really need to know how this was controlled for culture. Were the wealthier people in the study more likely to be from a culutre that gestured more?
February 18th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
I imagine affluent parents gesture more with their toddlers because they get to spend more time with them?
February 19th, 2009 at 2:59 am
So… gestures lead to gesticulation?
February 20th, 2009 at 3:03 am
Perhaps we can have baby programs teaching sign language.
February 22nd, 2009 at 9:39 pm
Maybe I missed something, but I thought the study was about how parents responded to the baby’s gestures as well as the frequency of parental gestures directed toward the baby with an explicit meaning.
Less frequent interaction (of any kind) might lead to a smaller vocabulary.
February 24th, 2009 at 11:07 pm
I would also add that there are possibly more violent gestures slapping, spanking ect in a poorer household. Thereby the waving of a hand may symbolize a spanking soon to come. Creating a fight or flight response or flinch response in a very young child. An abusive parent will visually sense this reaction in their child and reduce flagrant hand gesturing while speaking. Because 1- to avoid detection of the physical abuse and 2- to instill a sense of calm in the child if there is no present attempt to hit the child.
March 5th, 2009 at 12:00 am
Babies do understand more than we believe they do. They know when we are angry and they show us that they know. They are aware of what they like and don’t like through associations of their senses. They respond to a stimulus. And they are constantly absorbing and learning from their surroundings.
One of the reasons I am studying to become a pediatrician
October 24th, 2009 at 4:10 am
Not too different from Basil Bernstein’s work from decades ago, then.
June 26th, 2010 at 10:16 pm
[...] Then, she started signing “dog” too, which I find amazing because a) we don’t have one, b) the first time she saw the sign was early January at a friend’s place and she was terrified of the dog and c) her Dad hadn’t been doing the sign, only me, so it’s been weekends only. Even more impressive, she did the sign when a dog she couldn’t even see *barked*. I checked it a few times and she definitely knew what it was. And apparently, her greater use of signs at this age will have a direct correlation to the variety in her lexicon when she’s older. [...]