Baby Gestures Linked to Vocabulary Development

[EFerrari]

Baby Gestures Linked to Vocabulary Development

By Randy Dotinga
healthday Reporter – 1 hr 2 mins ago

THURSDAY, Feb. 12 (HealthDay News) -- New research suggests the income and education levels of parents are connected to a baby's skills with gesturing, which in turn can indicate whether a child will develop strong language abilities.

"The children who are gesturing about more things in their environment have larger vocabularies later," said study author Meredith L. Rowe. "And we see that children from higher socioeconomic levels are gesturing more."

The research doesn't prove that children in less privileged families gesture less and therefore grow up with more limited vocabularies. Nor is every baby destined to follow the general patterns found by researchers.

"We're not saying that gesture is the whole story," added Rowe, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago. But the links uncovered in the study do help researchers "pinpoint some things that seem to matter," she said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20090212/hl_hsn/babygestureslinkedtovocabularydevelopment





"That was to this, Hyperion to a satyr."

[ananda]

1. So the question is..

.. why don't lower income babies gesture as much?

Is it possible that it's a matter of attention?

In other words, the problem isn't gesturing but
something else.. like slack to give babies more
attention and stimulation.

[EFerrari]

2. The problem isn't gesturing or not gesturing but gesture is visible

and can be quantified?

[ulysses]

3. poor babies don't grow up in objectless environments.

Suspect it's a much more complex and circular relationship than the availability of toys.

[EFerrari]

4. Agreed. A finger is an object, a nose is an object, a breast is an object.

Inhaled air is an object.

[ulysses]

8. I suspect that the finding is valid, but the conjectures are maybe a little off.

There are a lot of things that factor into how a child learns. If your mom works late hours and rides the bus to and from her job, that's going to have an impact on how you achieve compared to the child whose mom stays at home and whose grandparents actively exposed her to lots of questions about the world when she was young.

[EFerrari]

10. Could be. It's interesting that the solution in this article is imagined to be

mostly more stuff, i.e., toys and furniture.

[ulysses]

13. I want to hope that that's a failure of journalism and not science.

[EFerrari]

15. Maybe simply cultural or, both our science and our journalism.

It's funny because my brother is a little more well off than I was when I had little tiny kids. And he and his wife are devoted to their girls but it tends to show up as stuff. My nieces haven't had the same challenge to make toys or make up stories or songs or games because the environment is always supplying them. I think? The environment has to "fail" just well enough to challenge the kid to contribute, supply his/her own gesture and I don't know how often that happens for middle class kids any more where it certainly was routine for me and even, for my kids in the 70s.

[Oregone]

5. Blah...

Do parents who teach and respond to gestures also talk to their kids more? Correlation is not causation. Don't draw too much here. It may have more to do with a reciprocal parental interaction than actual an inherent ability to gesture from birth.

[EFerrari]

6. It's very unlikely that you never gestured to your child unless

you remained perfectly still including your eye movements. :)

[Oregone]

7. I misread at first...

I thought they were talking about signs...I still think not much can be drawn here due to environmental reciprocation that encourages and teaches gesturing. So I think it still comes back to what the parents/environments are doing, not what the child is born with. If a parent encourages gesturing, they probably encourage speech. You see? It may not be the gesturing at all that has anything to do with anything.

[EFerrari]

9. I tend to think it's both but, what this study seems to be saying

(very modestly, which I like) is that a kid's gesturing may be a predictor of the ease of language acquisition. If that turns out to be true, then a mom / caretaker might be able to spot some kinds of deficits a little earlier and / or provide more ops for the baby.

Of my two sons, one spoke at 18 months and later had some learning problems; the other kid spoke at 7 months and also had some learning problems. Both high I.Q. but had reading problems. The second kid had more time with me and also more stuff around. Both boys found a way to go around whatever the deficit was, the first one actually sang before he talked and the younger kiddo started drawing as soon as he could hold a crayon. Both of them now have respectable vocabularies but, I'm wondering if I'd had this information, I'd have noticed that the older one was more quiet and still. Interesting. :)

[Oregone]

12. "gesturing may be a predictor of the ease of language acquisition"

Well, if it is correlated as suggested, yes.

BUT, if it is merely that each separate behavior is influenced by the same environmental factors (caretakers' interaction), then such an absentee caretaker may not have the ability to "predict" anything based on the lack of behavior. Know what Im saying?

A lot of people are told not to drink with a baby in them, but they do anyway....and thats common knowledge. This on the other hand, would take some teaching to hammer in. You see, the reason children *may not be* gesturing (parents), could be what you are depending on the identify the lack of behavior. May not do a lot.

Studies like this are great to show linked behaviors, but in the long run, may not do tons to change development of human race.

[EFerrari]

16. There would have to be another study done (or found, iirc, there are some out there)

re the care provider's responsiveness, sure.

[Peace Patriot]

11. I saw a Nova once, where they had a small baby lying on his back on a table with a

mobile moving above him. They filmed the baby at regular speed, and he seemed to be making random gestures, thrusting his arms here and there. But when they slowed the film speed down, you could see that every one of his gestures was an attempt to grab one of the objects in the mobile, which he was tracking with his eyes. He couldn't sit up and get closer, and try to grab them for real. And probably his grasp would have been imperfect. But it was like he was rehearsing for the time when he could actually grab, inspect, look at, eat?, the moving objects. Nova tracked it and showed the lines from eye to hand to distant object. It was amazing to watch.

This was an important lesson for me when I became a mom. I observed these kinds of gestures, encouraged them, put objects out of reach then brought them into grasp range, etc., with my baby. (He turned into a VERY smart kid and adult--and I think how he was raised had something to do with it.) I think almost nothing babies do is random. I think they almost always have a plan in mind, or are exercising some pre-cognitive ability (for instance, babbling is an attempt to replicate what they hear, and eventually they get it right).

If that Nova could be shown to all expectant mothers, it would be great. If you believe in the intelligence of your baby, he/she actually becomes more intelligent. Babies who don't have a mom, dad or someone else who understands their difficult intellectual/physical journey will likely have a hard time catching up. The human mind is an amazing thing, though. It is incredibly adaptable, and continues to learn. Some things might be harder to learn later, but that doesn't mean anyone should give up. The stories about stroke victims, with partially damaged brains, learning to talk again by using another part of the brain, tell us how adaptable our brains are. It's a true truism that, if you learn two languages in infancy, it's MUCH easier for you to learn additional languages later, but if you're limited to one language in infancy, you can still learn more languages--it just takes more work. The same with kids who may have been deprived because their parents weren't aware of the problems that their infants were trying to solve, nor the meaning of their infants' various gestures. The child or later adult needs to find a way around that early handicap--and there should be educational programs designed to do that.

I think, though, that the most important things are hard to quantify: love and approval. People don't need much encouragement to learn. We are pre-programmed to learn. We should be more into removing obstacles to learning, than trying to pour knowledge into kids' heads, as if they were empty vessels. So, if lack of recognition of your gestures when you were an infant is an obstacle to your acquiring a richer vocabulary, later on, then the educational system should find some way around (or a way to remedy) that handicap. Perhaps kids should throw a ball back and forth between them as they shout out new words. Something like that. Re-coordinate the physical gestures with the brain synapses for new words.

[EFerrari]

14. I think I remember that Nova!

This might horrify some of you but for my second go around, I rebelled and took charge of the whole birth. The most important thing, looking back, was that I didn't allow any silver nitrate drops into the baby's eyes. I knew he had zero chance of picking up anything in the birth canal so, I signed a stack of "against medical advice" forms. Yikes. The doctor hated me, probably.

But, my baby started "tracking" me nearly immediately. Certainly during the first week, even before he could really manage his head, he was tracking my movements in the room because he could SEE. And that sped our bonding up considerably!

[elleng]

17. Thanks SO MUCH for this!

Have sent to my daughters, whose development I'm now rerunning in my mind. They're both inherently 'teachers,' and studying same for our future babes!

[EFerrari]

18. Super. It's an interesting idea, I thought.

:hi: