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Children use gesture before they can speak
June 22, 2001Children start trying to communicate with gestures even before they can speak words.
This is the finding reported by Professor Virginia Volterra, of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Riherche, Italy, in an invited lecture today, Thursday 5 July, at the European Congress of Psychology, held at the Barbican Centre, London.
Professor Volterra summarised several studies conducted with hearing children which showed that at around one year of age they started to use gestures to try to communicate. Even when they moved on to two word speech, they still used gestures and a combination of gestures and speech.
In her discussion of these findings, Professor Volterra showed how deaf and hearing children exposed to a sign language as their first languge acquired it naturally, following developmental stages that are comparable to those in children acquiring a spoken language. In addition, hearing children who learn a sign language as a foreign language in junior school improve their attention and their visuospatial abilities.
Professor Volterra said: ‘Taken as a whole, these findings strongly support the view that the analysis of gestural communication in both hearing and deaf people is an important tool for gaining insight into the nature of human language’.
British Psychological Society (BPS)
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