Gesture in Language: Development Across the Lifespan

When do human beings begin producing gestures, and how do they evolve throughout our cognitive and social development?

This book investigates the rich and complex ways in which gesture precedes language development and then is used in conjunction with language across the lifespan.

Some experts argue that gesture is a part of language, while others argue it is a partner to language. But all agree that gesture plays a major role in language development and practices, and therefore must be captured by scientific analyses.

This volume explores gesture's many functions--communicative, restorative, cognitive--across cultures and ages, in monolingual and multilingual populations, in students and in teachers.

Gestures, verbal productions, signs, gazes, facial expressions, and postures are all part of our socially learned, intersubjective communicative systems that we combine for the purpose of sharing meaning, referring to present and absent entities and events,  expressing projects, desires, and feelings, and so much more.

Collectively, the chapters demonstrate how gestures contribute to the cognitive and social development of humans within their lifespan, and may also indicate the efficacy of interactional practices and cognitive processes.

This book is thought-provoking reading for psycholinguists, cognitive scientists, and all who study language development.

 

Aliyah Morgenstern, PhD, is Professor of English linguistics and language acquisition at Sorbonne Nouvelle University. Her research is focused on multimodal interaction and language development, using ethnographic methods to capture ecological data. Dr. Morgenstern's current research projects intend to retrace children's pathways into multimodal language acquisition in a scaffolding interactional environment. She also works on typological and cultural differences in multimodal adult-child and adult-adult interactions in French, English, Russian, German, and French Sign Language. Dr. Morgenstern uses a plurisemiotic, multi-linguistic level approach, and a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses. 

Susan Goldin-Meadow, PhD, is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Psychology and Committee on Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include language development and creation as well as gesture's role in communicating, thinking, and learning. Dr. Goldin-Meadow's research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the March of Dimes, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke. She has served as a member of the language review panel for NIH, has been a Member-at-Large to the Section on Linguistics and Language Science in AAAS, and was part of the Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development sponsored by the National Research Council and the Institute of Medicine and leading to the book Neurons to Neighborhoods. She is a Fellow of AAAS, APS, and APA (Divisions 3 and 7). in 2001, Dr. Goldin-Meadow was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a James McKeen Cattell Fellowship which led to her two recently published books, Resilience of Language and Hearing Gesture. She is currently the President of the Cognitive Developmental Society and the editor of the new journal sponsored by the Society for Language Development, Language Learning and Development. Dr. Goldin-Meadow also serves as chair of the developmental area program.