PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

There is ongoing discussion on the function of the early production of gestures with regard to whether they reduce children's cognitive demands and free their capacity to perform other tasks (e.g., Goldin-Meadow & Wagner, 2005) or whether young children point in order to share their interest or to elicit information from their caregivers (e.g., Begus & Southgate, 2012; Liszkowski, Carpenter, Henning, Striano & Tomasello, 2004). The different assumptions lead to diverse predictions regarding infants' gestural or multimodal behavior in recurring situations, in which some objects are familiar and others are unfamiliar. To examine these different predictions, we observed 14 children aged between 14 and 16 months biweekly in a semi-experimental situation with a caregiver and explored how children's verbal and gestural behaviors change as a function of their familiarization with objects. We split the children into two groups based on their reported vocabulary size at 21 months of age (larger vs. smaller vocabulary). We found that children with a larger vocabulary at 21 months had an increase in their pointing with words toward unfamiliar objects as well as in their total amount of words, whereas for children with smaller vocabularies we did not find differences in relation to their familiarization with objects. We discuss these findings in terms of a social-pragmatic use of pointing gestures.