This week’s theme is interactivity
Children learn in a different way when they are socially engaged – hearing many words isn’t enough, little ones need to be part of the conversation. You don’t have to wait until your little one is talking to engage them in a back-and-forth interaction. This week we will share information about different ways your little one learns from interactivity, and how you can boost interactivity in your interactions.
Read more about interactivity basics
Gestures are a core element of communication, that everybody uses when they interact with others. Some gestures look like what they mean so it is easy to guess their meaning (e.g., drink). Some gestures are part of important social routines (e.g., waving goodbye). Some gestures (like pointing) are used to attract your attention to something, comment on something, or ask for further interaction. When little ones are building up their communication skills, they can use gestures to expand their communications.
Scientists often separate gestures into ‘conventional’ and ‘deictic’ gestures. Conventional gestures like waving goodbye, or making the gesture for ‘drink’ are symbols that people use in a limited range of contexts (e.g., only when a person leaves, or only when someone is drinking). By contrast, ‘deictic’ gestures are the ones children use flexibly to start or to continue a conversation. For example, your little one might…
- gesture at something to attract your attention to it…
- gesture at something to comment on it or point out something about it…
- gesture at something to ask for further information about it…
All of these gestures actually help to promote or sustain join attention and stimulate a back and forth interactions with turn taking. These gestures are signs that your little one is learning more about how to have a conversation, and practising the skills they will as their language skills develop. Some studies have shown that children who use more of these conversation-boosting ‘deictic’ gestures have larger vocabularies. You can help your little one on the path to stronger language skills by watching out for these kinds of gestures and joining in a conversation when you see them.
To boost your interactions through gestures you can:
- watch out for gestures
- guess what they might mean
- follow up a gesture to start a back-and-forth interaction
Watch: A clip about how gestures are used for communication (1:57)
Watch: A clip about the emergence of pointing (2:02)
Read more about Pointing & Gesture
http://www.hanen.org/Helpful-Info/Articles/The-Importance-of-Gestures.aspx
http://www.hanen.org/Helpful-Info/Articles/What%E2%80%99s-the-Point-of-Pointing-.aspx
Read the science:
Manwaring, S. S., Swineford, L., Mead, D. L., Yeh, C. C., Zhang, Y., & Thurm, A. (2019). The gesture–language association over time in toddlers with and without language delays. Autism & Developmental Language Impairments, 4, 2396941519845545. Free Access Link.