Major
Psychology
Anticipated Graduation Year
2022
Access Type
Open Access
Abstract
Gesture serves as a bridge for communication for children who cannot yet fully communicate verbally. Child gesture is closely related to future vocabulary scores (Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009). Many studies with similar results have an English monolingual sample but not many studies have a bilingual sample. In this study, 45 bilingual participant’s gestures and their vocabulary growth were measured to see if a relation between the two existed. We found a negative relation between gesture use at 18-months and vocabulary growth from 18 to 30 months. This is an unexpected result as it does not agree with previous literature.
Faculty Mentors & Instructors
Dr. Perla B. Gámez, Associate Professor of Psychology
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Relation Between Bilingual Child Gesture use and Language Development
Gesture serves as a bridge for communication for children who cannot yet fully communicate verbally. Child gesture is closely related to future vocabulary scores (Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009). Many studies with similar results have an English monolingual sample but not many studies have a bilingual sample. In this study, 45 bilingual participant’s gestures and their vocabulary growth were measured to see if a relation between the two existed. We found a negative relation between gesture use at 18-months and vocabulary growth from 18 to 30 months. This is an unexpected result as it does not agree with previous literature.