VERBAL LABELS AND GESTURAL ROUTINES

IN PARENTAL COMMUNICATION
WITH YOUNG CHILDREN
Laura L. Namy, Linda Acredolo, and Susan Goodwyn

ABSTRACT: Infants initially use words and symbolic gestures in markedly similar
ways, to name and refer to objects. The goal of these studies is to examine how
parental verbal and gestural input shapes infants expectations about the communicative functions of words and gestures. The studies reported here suggest that infants may initially accept both words and gestures as symbols because parents often
produce both verbal labels and gestural routines within the same joint-attention
contexts. In two studies, we examined the production of verbal and gestural labels
in parental input during joint-attention episodes. In Study 1, parent-infant dyads
engaged in a picture-book reading task in which parents introduced their infants to
drawings of unfamiliar objects (e.g., accordion). Parents verbal labeling far outstripped their gestural communication, but the number of gestures produced was
non-trivial and was highly predictive of infant gestural production. In Study 2,
parent-infant dyads engaged in a free-play session with familiar objects. In this context, parents produced both verbal and gestural symbolic acts frequently with reference to objects. Overall, these studies support an input-driven explanation for why
infants acquire both words and gestures as object names, early in development.

Recent research has found that infants as young as 12 months readily

map novel words to object categories in experimental (Waxman & Hall,
1993; Waxman & Markow, 1995; Woodward, Markman, & Fitzsimmons,
1994) and observational (Fenson et al., 1994) contexts. They are able to
map a novel word to an object category (such as fruit) and extend the label
Laura L. Namy, Psychology Department, Emory University; Linda Acredolo, Psychology
Department, University of California, Davis; Susan Goodwyn, Psychology Department, California State University, Stanislaus.
This work was supported, in part, by grant HD25476 from the National Institutes of Child
Health and Human Development. We gratefully acknowledge the parents and children who
participated in these studies. Thanks are due to Dedre Gentner for sparking the first authors
interest in pursuing the issues addressed in this paper, to Jana Iverson for coding advice, and
to Aimee Campbell for comments on the paper. We also thank Kristina Clark for her assistance with data collection and coding.
Address correspondence to Laura L. Namy, Department of Psychology, Emory University,
Atlanta, GA 30322; e-mail: lnamy6emory.edu.
Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 24(2), Summer 2000
Q 2000 Human Sciences Press, Inc.

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to novel members of the target category that have never been explicitly
labeled. Infants success in this task suggests that they appreciate that
words are symbols, that they stand for the objects to which they refer.
Around the same time that infants begin to acquire words, they also begin
to use symbolic gestures to refer to objects, for example, flapping their
hands to indicate a bird. Infants appear to use words and gestures in much
the same ways, specifically to name and/or request objects (Acredolo &
Goodwyn, 1985, 1988; Iverson, Capirci, & Caselli, 1994; Namy & Waxman, 1998a). These findings, in conjunction with the research on sign language acquisition among children of native signers (Newport & Meier,
1985; Orlansky & Bonvillian, 1988), suggest that the verbal and gestural
modalities are equally viable forms of symbolic communication early in
development.
In interesting contrast to these findings, research on the use of symbolic gestures in older toddlers and preschool-aged children suggests that
children find the use of gestures to represent their knowledge of objects
somewhat difficult. This literature indicates that children often demonstrate
their rich knowledge of object and event categories through pretend play.
However, the evidence suggests that children more readily depict their
knowledge of objects when they have an object available to incorporate
into the play routine than when they are required to represent their knowledge gesturally (e.g., Jackowitz & Watson, 1980; Ungerer, Zelazo, Kearsley, & OLeary, 1981). Furthermore, there is a systematic developmental
progression in gestural symbols, from substitution gestures in which children use body parts in lieu of an object (e.g., pretending that a finger is a
toothbrush) to empty-handed gestures where the child pretends to hold the
object (e.g., a toothbrush) involved in the play routine (Boyatzis & Watson,
1993; OReilly, 1995; Overton & Jackson, 1973).
Given this developmental trend in childrens ability to represent object
knowledge gesturally, how can we account for the finding from naturalistic
studies that hearing infants use gestures to communicate early on, at the
very cusp of productive language? Furthermore, why do infants employ
gestures and words in such markedly similar ways at the onset of symbolic
communication? Acredolo and Goodwyn (1985, 1988; Goodwyn & Acredolo, 1993) provide an important clue. They find that the majority of gestures acquired by infants are derived from gestural or motor routines that
parents engage in with their infants, either deliberately (e.g., Itsy-Bitsy Spider song where the song is accompanied by a finger gesture depicting a
spider crawling motion) or unwittingly (e.g., sniffing a flower). Thus, Acredolo and Goodwyns work suggests that infants acquire gestures that are
presented during interactive, joint-attention episodes. Importantly, the rich,

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interactive contexts in which infants acquire gestures appear to be the

same joint-attention episodes in which parents typically label objects verbally. In fact, gestural routines and verbal labeling often occur simultaneously, supplying referential information in both the verbal and gestural
modalities.
The possibility that childrens early acquisition of gestural and verbal
communication is guided by the structure of parental input has broad theoretical implications, highlighting how the social context and parental structuring of the environment may facilitate symbol acquisition. This argument
accords well with Vygotskys (1962) and Bruners (1966) approaches to
development, in which the social structure serves as a primary source of
learning for young children. The suggestion that childrens use of words
and gestures is scaffolded by parental input is particularly interesting within
the context of language-learning, given that language appears to be a
highly complex and specialized ability in adults and older children. The
finding that infants often use words and gestures interchangeably to communicate whereas older childrens communicative skills are more specialized suggests some reorganization of verbal and gestural abilities over
development.
Consistent with this notion of reorganization is the finding that infants
spontaneous use of gestures as symbols declines over time. As infants production of symbolic gesture declines, gestures begin to take on more of a
supplementary role in communication (Iverson et al., 1994; McNeill,
1992). Acredolo and Goodwyn (1988) and Iverson et al. (1994) both reported this developmental decline in infants production of symbolic
gestures. Namy and Waxman (1998a) found a similar decline in young
childrens comprehension of symbolic gestures. They suggest that the developmental change in the acceptance of gestures as object names is a
result of a shifting conceptualization of the relative function of words and
gestures.
The goal of this study was to assess the extent to which the communicative environment, namely the parental input, facilitates the acquisition of
gestural symbols that appear to be acquired so fluidly early in development. If words and gestures are both readily available in the input (and, as
is often the case, tend to co-occur) infants may have no cause to discriminate, on the basis of the context in which they are introduced, between
parents communicative intent when they produce a distinctive gesture and
their intent in producing a verbal label. That is, parental input may encourage infants to interpret the two types of input, gestures and verbal labels,
similarly. Infants may then recruit either words or gestures, depending
upon their salience and upon limitations in the infants production capaci-

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ties. Thus, the presence of both verbal labels and gestural routines in parents input may facilitate the recruitment of gestures into the infants symbol lexicon. In the current studies, we seek to determine whether parents
produce gestures within the same joint-attention contexts in which they
tend to use verbal labels, at a point when their infants are just beginning to
communicate symbolically.
Little work has been done comparing the contexts in which verbal
labeling and symbolic gestures occur in parental input. Iverson, Capirci,
Longobardi, and Caselli (1999) examined parental production of a wide
array of gestures including deictic (e.g., pointing), conventional (e.g., shaking the head to mean no), representational (e.g., extending and retracting
the index finger to indicate a snail) and emphatic gestures (e.g., extending
the arms outward). They found that gestures tended to co-occur with
speech and that the frequency of parental gesturing was predictive of the
frequency of their childrens gesturing at 16 and 20 months of age. However, it is unclear from these data whether the representational gestures in
particular (i.e., those that infants tend to recruit as symbolic gestures) were
presented within the same contexts as verbal labels.
Studies by Messinger and Fogel (1998) and Gelman, Coley, Rosengren, Hartman and Pappas (1998) provided additional examples of infantparent gestural communication. However, neither paper directly assessed
parental production of symbolic gestures. Rather, Messinger and Fogel
(1998) restricted themselves to the use of giving and taking gestures, and
did not assess systematically how parental input might shape infant communication. Their parental data focused predominantly upon the extent to
which parents react to infant attempts at communication rather than their
input to their children. Gelman et al. (1998) focused predominantly on
deictic gestures. They examine parents use of trace gestures, in which
parents outline the shape of an object depicted in a picture book. These
trace gestures might be construed as depicting characteristics of the objects themselves, but probably not in a way that could be temporally and
spatially displaced. That is, traces are not gestures that a child or adult
could use to refer to an absent referent. In fact, the authors suggest that
these traces serve a primarily deictic function (Gelman et al., 1998).
The purpose of this paper is to examine the frequency of parental
production of verbal and gestural communication about objects within
joint-attention episodes. In two studies, we observed parents spontaneous
communication during two different joint-attention contexts, to ascertain
whether the evidence supports the proposal that infants acquisition of
symbolic gestures is supported by parental input. The goal of these studies
is to assess (a) whether parents routinely produce symbolic gestures within

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the same joint-attention contexts in which they label objects verbally and
(b) more speculatively (because the infants in these studies are just on the
cusp of symbolic communication), whether there is evidence of a direct
link between the frequency with which parents gesture to their children
during joint-attention episodes and the frequency with which children employ gestures to communicate. Evidence indicating the presence of gestures in parental input and linking gestural input with infant gesture production would support the argument that parental input influences the
equipotentiality with which children acquire and interpret verbal and gestural symbols early in development.

Study 1
In the first study, we examined the extent to which parents employ verbal
and gestural labels when introducing infants to pictures of novel objects.
We provided parent-infant dyads with a picture book depicting objects that
were unlikely to be familiar to young children (e.g., hot water bottle, hole
punch). Each infant was approximately 15 months of age. Each dyad participated in a 5-minute reading session during which parents were instructed to go through the pictures with their infants as they would read a
new book at home. We examined the frequency of verbal labels and gestural routines in parental introduction of these pictures of novel objects.
Although a broad range of gestural information is available to infants
during normal discourse, we focused exclusively upon gestures that depicted some unique, identifiable property of the object, gestures that infants might subsequently recruit to convey reference to that particular object (e.g., a rowing motion to depict an oar). Parents nodding, pointing,
and other deictic or non-representational gestures were excluded from the
analysis.
In this study, we manipulated two factors that we suspected may contribute to the frequency of parental gesturing. First, we examined whether
the amount of experience parents have producing symbolic gestures influences infants likelihood of producing novel gestural labels during this
picture-book task. We explored this issue by administering the task to two
groups of families. Half of the dyads participating in the study were families who had been participating in a sign-training study, in which the
parents were instructed to introduce their infants to particular symbolic
gestures during everyday interactions. The remaining half of the dyads
were control subjects who had undergone no sign enrichment experience.
Our second manipulation was to explore how parents gestural label-

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ing varied as a function of the features of the objects depicted. In the

picture-book, we varied whether the objects depicted tended to have salient, prototypical gestures or actions associated with them (e.g., egg
beaters, an oar) or have no such stereotyped gestures (e.g., a hot water
bottle, a door stop). We predicted that parents would be more likely to
produce gestures for the objects with stereotyped gestures available than
for those that had no characteristic action.
Method
Participants. Participants in this study were 80 parent-infant dyads recruited to participate in this task as part of a larger study on gesture and
communication (see Acredolo, Goodwyn, Horobin, & Emmons, in press;
Goodwyn & Acredolo, 1998). The average age of the infant participants
was 15 months, 3 days (range 4 14 months, 23 days to 15 months, 9
days). Half of the participants were sign trained families who had been
involved in a research project instructing parents on how to incorporate
symbolic gestures into their communication with their infants. The other
half were control families who had received no explicit training or instruction in gestural communication.
Stimuli. Parents were given a book constructed in the laboratory, containing 20 pages, each depicting a black and white line drawing of an
object that was unlikely to be familiar to 15-month-olds. A label for each
line drawing was printed above or below the picture. Half of the drawings
were of objects that tend to have a characteristic gesture or action sequence associated with them (e.g., binoculars, an oar, hereafter referred to
as action-oriented objects). The remaining half of the drawings tend not to
evoke any particular conventionalized gestural action or routine (e.g., hot
water bottle, antenna, hereafter referred to as non-action-oriented objects).
Procedure. Parent-infant dyads were invited to sit at a table with the
infant seated next to the parent or on the parents lap. The experimenter
handed the picture book to the parent and explained that it depicted pictures that tend to be unfamiliar to infants and that she would like the parent
and infant to read the book as they would read a new book they had
brought home. The experimenter then left the room. The reading session
was videotaped through a one-way mirror. All participants read through
portions or all of the book during the 5-minute interval. After 5 minutes,
the experimenter returned and the session was discontinued.
The video-taped reading sessions were subsequently coded to ascer-

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tain the frequency of verbal and gestural labels that parents and their infants produced in reference to the book and its contents.
Coding. Each session was coded for verbal labels and gestural labels
produced by the parent and/or the child during joint-attention episodes
within the book-reading task. Verbal labels were defined as any count
noun that was used uniquely to identify the object depicted. For example,
a parent might label the street light as a street lamp or as a light; either
would have been coded as a verbal label. Gestural labels were defined as
any gesture that depicted some stereotyped action involving the object on
the page. For example, a parent might perform a rowing motion while
looking at the picture of an oar with her child. Any distinctive gesture that
appeared to be semantically related to or representative of the object depicted was coded as a potential gestural label. It is worth noting that the
gestures coded as gestural labels were not necessarily produced by the
parents with the intention of labeling. The important point is that infants
may perceive these gestures as potential object labels, regardless of the
parents intentions, because they are produced within the same socialreferential contexts in which verbal labels are produced. Because the goal
of this paper is to characterize the nature of the input as it might be perceived from the childs perspective, we do not attempt to disambiguate
intentional from unintentional gestural labels on the part of the parent.
Non-representational deictic gestures such as pointing were not considered gestural labels, nor were head nods. Verbal and gestural labels
pertaining to things outside of the book were excluded from the analysis.
Verbal and gestural labeling were counted only when both parents and
childs gaze were directed towards the book. A repeated gesture was
counted as more than one instance if there was a clear pause or relaxation
of the hand position between repetitions. Successive repetitions of the
same gesture without pause were considered a single gestural label. We
made this coding decision based on traditional gesture coding schemes
which use the returning of the hand to the resting position as an indicator
of the boundary of a gestural utterance. It is possible that this coding decision resulted in a masking the intensity of the input, however, our coders
report that these successive repetitions were relatively infrequent in the
input.
Three coders analyzed the labeling behaviors (both verbal and gestural) of the 80 dyads. To assess reliability, three coders independently
coded 10% of the sessions in common. Reliability was calculated by assessing the number of instances of labels (verbal and gestural) noted by
each coder that were also noted by the other two coders, using the kappa

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statistic. This reliability assessment yielded 100% agreement, k 4 1.0,

p , .001 (see Siegel & Castellan, 1988, pp. 289).

Results and Discussion

The data from these 80 families suggest that parents produced both
verbal and gestural labels during the picture-book reading session; however verbal labeling outstripped gestural labeling considerably. The frequency of verbal and gestural labels produced in each condition is depicted in Table 1. We conducted a three-way ANOVA on the frequency of
parents verbal and gestural labels, with Sign Training (2: Sign Trained
versus Control) as a between subjects factor and Picture Type (2: actionoriented versus not) and Symbol Type (2: verbal versus gestural label) as
within subject factors. This analysis yielded no reliable effect of Sign Training or Picture Type. However there was a main effect of Symbol Type, F(1,
77) 4 195.92, p , .001, indicating that more verbal labels were produced
than gestural labels. There was also a Picture Type by Symbol Type interaction, F(1, 77) 4 31.02, p , .001. Post-hoc analysis (Tukeys hsd, p , .05)
indicated that, as predicted, parents produced a greater number of gestures
for the action-oriented (M 4 2.0, SD 4 4.01, Range 4 019) than the
non-action-oriented pictures (M 4 .08, SD 4 .31, Range 4 02). In contrast, parents produced more words for the non-action-oriented pictures
(M 4 13.90, SD 4 8.08, Range 4 136) than the action-oriented pictures
(M 4 12.51, SD 4 8.34, Range 4 037), indicating that parents were

TABLE 1
Study 1, Descriptive Data on Words and Gestures Produced
by Parents and Children
Words

Sign-Trained
Parents
Infants
Control
Parents
Infants

Gestures

SD (Range)

SD (Range)

27.79
0.0

16.14 (171)
0.0 (N/A)

2.90
0.28

4.87 (019)
1.30 (08)

25.05
0.0

15.30 (169)
0.0 (N/A)

1.25
0.13

3.09 (014)
0.40 (02)

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more likely to employ verbal labels when distinctive gestural routines were
unavailable. This outcome is interesting, for it suggests that words and
gestures serve complementary functions in introducing infants to novel
objects.
We also examined the frequency of infants production of each symbol type. Infants produced very few labels, either verbal or gestural, for the
pictures depicted in the book. Collapsed across sign-trained and control
dyads, infants produced an average of 0.2 (SD 4 0.96) gestural labels and
none of the infants produced verbal labels during the session. All of the
infants gestural labels were imitations of labels produced by the parents
immediately prior. There were no differences in production between infants of sign-trained and control parents on either measure. This outcome,
in conjunction with the absence of an effect of sign training on parental
input, suggests that sign-training may not readily and instantaneously transfer to novel contexts for either parents or their infants. However, a Fishers
exact test comparing the number of parents producing any versus no gestures in the Sign-Trained group (22 of whom produced gestures) and the
Control group (13 of whom produced gestures) yielded a reliable difference between the two groups, p 4 .024. This outcome suggests that the
lack of influence of sign training in the ANOVA was a result of the wide
variability in frequency of gestures produced in both conditions. This analysis indicates that the Sign-Trained parents were more likely to produce
symbolic gestures than the Control parents.
Interestingly, the infants production of gestural labels was marginally
greater than zero, the number of verbal labels produced, t (79) 4 1.86,
p 4 .07, suggesting that infants may have been more inclined to imitate
novel gestural labels than novel verbal labels. Furthermore, the number of
gestures individual parents produced was highly correlated with the number of gestures that their infants produced during the session, among both
the Control and the Sign Trained parents (rs 4 .79 and .63 respectively,
both ps , .001).1 The relation between parental and infant verbal labeling
could not be assessed, due to the floor effect for infants verbal labeling.
These data are noteworthy for three reasons. First, although parental
production of gestural labels was considerably lower than that of verbal
labels, an average of two gestural labels within a five-minute period is nontrivial. Given how common picture book reading is among middle-class
American families, this rate may indicate that infants accumulate a large
amount of gestural input that has symbolic potential during normal, everyday interactions. Second, this study involved pictures that may less
readily afford distinctive actions than would interactions with objects.
These stimuli also depicted unfamiliar objects for which dyads were un-

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likely to have developed gestural routines. Furthermore, infants and parents

were typically seated side-by-side or with the infant on the parents lap,
rather than facing each other, which may have inhibited gestural communication. Thus, this rate of gesturing may under-represent the number of
gestures parents typically produce during joint-attentional contexts. Third,
these data suggest that the number of gestures that parents produce predicts the extent to which the infants recruit these gestures within their symbolic repertoire. Finally, the interactive joint-attention contexts in which
gestural labels were produced were indistinguishable from contexts in
which the parents provide verbal labels.
In the next experiment, we examine parental input to infants within a
different joint-attention context. Our goal in examining a different context
is not to provide a controlled manipulation of particular factors relevant to
gestural naming, but rather to explore parent-child interactions during a
second very common context, one that we believe may be likely to elicit a
greater number of gestures from parents, namely a free play session with
toys. Although many aspects of the context in Study 2 differ from Study 1,
there are three primary reasons we believed that this free play context was
likely to elicit more gestures than picture book reading. First, parent-infant
dyads interacted with three-dimensional objects as opposed to pictures.
The use of objects may elicit a greater number of gestural labels than the
picture-book reading task. Second, the objects employed were things that
tend to be familiar as opposed to unfamiliar to young children. The use of
familiar objects may increase the likelihood that the dyads will have established verbal and gestural routines with respect to these objects. Third, the
parents and children may play facing each other rather than side-by-side,
increasing the likelihood that the parent and child will share attention to
the gestural information.

Study 2
The goal of Study 2 was to derive a sample of parents gestural and
verbal labeling during a different parent-child interactive context from that
in Study 1. In this study, 12 parent-infant dyads involving 11- to 13-monthold infants participated in a 15-minute free-play session involving a wide
array of objects selected to be familiar to young children. For this study, we
selected 11- to 13-month-old infants in order to sample parental interactions when infants are just on the cusp of productive language. Because
parents and infants are likely to have developed both verbal and gestural
routines relating to many of these familiar objects, parental input in this

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context may differ from the types of information parents supplied in the
previous study.
Method
Participants. Participants consisted of 12 parent-infant dyads (M age of
infants 4 11 months, 26 days, range 4 10 months, 28 days - 12 months,
27 days). None of the families had participated in sign training prior to
participation in the study.
Stimuli. The stimuli for this study consisted of a wide range of toys and
books that were selected to be interesting, engaging, and familiar to young
children. Parents and infants were free to direct their attention to any of the
stimuli during the study. As a result, although all dyads had access to the
same set of objects, the particular objects with which each dyad interacted
varied somewhat from family to family. Some examples of stimuli available
for play include an array of toy animals, a toy airplane with people figures
that fit inside, a toy train, a play camera, a child-sized table with pretend
food and child-sized plates, cups, and utensils, and several board books.
Procedure. Parent-infant dyads were invited to be seated on the floor
in a small play room with the toys and books arrayed on the floor around
them. The experimenter explained to the parents that she would be sitting
in the corner, videotaping the parent-child interactions and that the parents
should play normally with their infants as they would at home. The experimenter instructed the parents that they were free to interact with anything
in the room, and that the play session would last 15 minutes. During the
session, the experimenter unobtrusively adjusted the cameras orientation
and zoom levels to follow the movements of the parent and infant, and to
ensure that both members of the dyad were captured on video at all times.
Coding. As in Study 1, coders noted each incident of parents production of verbal labels and distinctive gestures involving or representing objects (i.e., excluding pointing or holding up objects in a generic fashion)
within joint-attention episodes. Coders also noted any incident in which
the child produced either a verbal or gestural label. As in Study 1, labeling
instances were coded only when joint-attention was established, that is
when the child and parent directed their gaze to the same object or activity.
The span of gestures included in this analysis differed from those in
Study 1 in one important respect. In addition to coding those gestures pro-

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duced empty-handed, we also included parental gestures produced with

an object in hand. For example, if the parent held the toy camera up to her
eye and clicked the button, we counted this as a gestural label. We included these in-hand gestures because research by Acredolo and Goodwyn (1988) indicated that many of the (empty-handed) symbolic gestures
that infants produce are abstracted from routines originally performed with
objects in hand. We consider it likely that many of parents in-hand gestures were produced with the intention of demonstrating or playing with
the objects, as opposed to conveying symbolic information. However, because infants recruit gestural symbols from such play routines, we consider
parental play (i.e., in-hand gestures) as a potential basis for symbolic
behavior in infants. Because we are interested primarily in the origins of
infants symbolic use of empty-handed gestures as they relate to verbal
labeling, we did not code infants production of in-hand gestures as gestural labels. The exclusion of in-hand gestures for infants ensured that we
were measuring only the infants gestural labels and not their functional
play with objects.
A primary coder analyzed the labeling behaviors (both verbal and gestural) of all 12 dyads. A secondary coder analyzed six of the 12 dyads
(50%). As in Study 1, reliability was calculated using the kappa statistic
based on the number of individual instances of labeling behavior on which
the two coders agreed in their classification. Intercoder agreement was
highly reliable, k 4 .73, p , .001.
Results and Discussion
Parents produced both verbal and gestural labels frequently during
joint-attention episodes within the 15-min play session. Frequency of verbal and gestural labeling is depicted in Table 2. This outcome indicates a
TABLE 2
Study 2, Descriptive Data of Words and Gestures Produced by Parents
and Children
Words

Parents
Infants

Gestures

SD (Range)

SD (Range)

42.50
0.75

26.78 (1294)
1.76 (05)

39.50
0.17

18.78 (1664)
0.58 (02)

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surprisingly high rate of labeling in both the verbal (2.8 labels per minute)
and gestural (2.6 labels per minute) modalities. The frequency of gestural
labels did not differ reliably from the frequency of verbal labels. This finding suggests that within the context of play with familiar objects, parents
provide a substantial amount of gestural input to their infants within the
same joint-attentional contexts in which they present verbal labels.
Importantly, this analysis included both empty-handed gestures and
those gestures that were produced with the objects in hand. Analysis of the
relative frequency of empty-handed gestures versus gestures with objects
in hand revealed that parents produced considerably fewer empty-handed
gestures (M 4 .58, SD 4 1.44, Range 4 05) than in-hand gestures
(M 4 38.92, SD 4 18.03, Range 4 1659), t(11) 4 7.65, p , .001. This
suggests that infants primary source of parental gestural information during
free play with objects is from distinctive routines with objects in hand.
Parents rarely produced empty-handed gestures during this play session.
This outcome contrasts with the outcome of Study 1. Although the incidence of gestures was considerably higher overall in Study 2 than in Study
1, empty-handed gestures were less prevalent in this free-play context than
in the picture-book reading context. However, it is important to note that
all gestures produced in Study 1 were, by necessity, empty-handed because no objects were present. The absence of objects to perform in-hand
gestures likely accounts for the higher incidence of empty-handed gestures
in Study 1 than Study 2.
As in Study 1, the infants in this study produced very few labels in
either modality. Only two infants produced any verbal labels (one child
produced four labels and the other produced five). In addition, only one
child produced any gestural labels, producing a total of two gestures.
These two gestures were empty-handed imitations of parental gestural labels. Because infants incidence of labeling was so low, we were unable to
assess whether parental symbol production was predictive of infant symbol
production for either modality. This low incidence of infant symbol production is not particularly surprising, given that the infants in this study
were only 12 months of age. However, it limits our conclusions to a characterization of parental input as opposed to an explicit link between input
and infant production within this free play context.
This study indicates that the precise contextual factors that contribute
to infants success at acquiring verbal labels for objects also conspire to
facilitate infants acquisition of gestural labels. Parental use of verbal and
gestural labels during free play is frequent and occurs during the same
joint-attention episodes in both modalities. As a result, parental input
within the context of free play with familiar objects provides very little

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reason for infants to dissociate the functions of verbal and gestural information.

General Discussion
These two experiments indicate that gestural labels occur regularly in parental input to infants during the same joint-attention episodes as do verbal
labels. In Study 1, we found that parents exhibit a relatively low incidence
of gestures as compared to verbal labels while reading a picture book of
unfamiliar objects to their infants but that the number of gestural labels
parents produced varied depending upon the nature of the objects depicted. Parents produced a greater number of gestural labels for objects
that have characteristic actions associated with them than for objects with
no such characteristic actions. In Study 2, we found that parents frequently
produced gestural labels during free play but the majority of their gestures
were actions produced with objects in hand.
Overall, parents provided gestural input to their infants surprisingly
frequently. This finding substantiates the notion that parental input provides
a strong basis for the equipotentiality observed between the verbal and
gestural modalities in other studies (Acredolo & Goodwyn, 1985; 1988;
Goodwyn & Acredolo, 1993; Iverson et al., 1994; Namy & Waxman,
1998a, b; Namy, in press). Because verbal and gestural input both occur
frequently within the same joint-attention episodes, parental input encourages infants to interpret verbal and gestural information similarly. This account is supported by two findings from Study 1. First, the evidence that
the amount of gestural input infants receive is predictive of infants gestural
production lends additional support to this account. Second, infants
greater willingness to produce novel gestures than words underscores the
infants interest in gestural input.
We speculate that this link between parental input to young children
and the frequency of gestural and verbal labels in the infants own lexicon
may also account for the finding that infants production and interpretation
of symbolic gestures declines over time. As infants become more proficient
language users, parents may decrease their use of gestural labels, with verbal labels eventually supplanting gestural labels in parental input as the
infants verbal comprehension increases. Indeed, evidence by Hodapp,
Goldfield and Boyatzis (1984) confirmed a decline in parental use of gestural scaffolding during parent-child routines such as roll-the-ball and
peek-a-boo as children master the behaviors that parents are scaffolding.
Thus, the finding that parents produce both verbal and gestural labels

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within the same contexts provides a mechanism through which infants may
initially acquire both verbal and gestural symbols, supporting a Vygotskian
social-scaffolding model. This study highlights the importance of studying
the development of the child in context, particularly the role of the social
and communicative input provided in everyday interactions with primary
caretakers. It is important to note that parents must further scaffold their
infants gesture use by attending carefully to childrens attempts at recruiting gestures as symbols, and providing the same reinforcement for infants
fledgling attempts at both gestural and verbal symbols, in order for symbols
to be acquired in both modalities. It is likely that parents differentially reinforce words and gestures over development as infants word production
increases, which may also modulate the frequency of symbolic gestures in
the infants lexicons.
An additional factor likely to influence the acquisition of gestural symbols is the infants ability to associate a gestural label not only with its
referent, but also with the corresponding verbal label. This association may
impact lexical development such that gesture acquisition serves ultimately
to facilitate the acquisition of verbal labels. Parents tended to supply verbal
and gestural information about the same objects and within the same jointattention episodes, enabling the infants to associate the two symbolic forms
with each other as well as with their referents.
Taken together, these studies document that gestural information is
regularly available in parental input to young children, occurs within the
same joint-attention contexts that verbal labeling does, and tends to depict
the same referents. These studies provide empirical confirmation that the
recruitment of gestural as well as verbal symbols into the infants early
lexicon is clearly supported and encouraged by parental input.

Note
1. There was one outlier dyad in the Sign Training group in which the parent produced 19
gestures (range excluding outlier was 015) and the infant produced 8 gestures (range
excluding outlier was 02). However, correlation between frequency of gestures in parental input and frequency of infants gestures was still highly reliable when this dyad was
excluded, r 4 .49, p , .001.

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