Gestures and multimodal development: Some key issues for child language acquisition
Résumé
Children begin to gesture long before talking. Gestures, such as pointing or waving goodbye, constitute the principal means of interacting conventionally with others before the emergence of the lexicon. Children continue to gesture after they start to talk, and through to adulthood. In spite of that, some key concepts related to gesture and language acquisition, both theoretical and methodological, still remain unclear and/or are out of consensus among scholars, such as gestures and language acquisition and evolution, multimodal development, form and function in gestures, and gesture classification and terminology. To better understand language acquisition, we will discuss these issues in the light of Adam Kendon’s work.