The Role of Gesture in Early Human Language Development Future Directions in the Origins of Language Inspired by the first1000days Project

Abstract

Gesture is a central element in language and language development as a result of the twin insights that i) all language is fundamentally multimodal, and ii) that gesture and language develop in such a tightly coupled manner that they are best understood as an integrated cognitive system. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in this field of research and to contribute a number of future directions, influenced by a global health perspective on the significance of gesture. This re- examination of the field is inspired by a recent data collection effort, the first1000days project, which promises to create an unprecedented longitudinal, naturalistic, and continuously sampled corpus by recording 20 children for 1000 days in their homes. To establish a basis for ground-breaking new work building on the first1000days project, the current work discusses the central lines of research on gesture in language in detail, with a special focus on the cognitive neuroscience of gesture and language. The story that emerges as we chart the conceptual issues of research on gesture and follow the developmental trajectory of infants’ first 1000 days is that gesture has a profound significance for almost every aspect of language, including how language systems develop in the brain, as well as for the diagnosis and prognosis of language impairments and clinical conditions associated with them. In providing such an expansive account, this paper synthesizes results from across clinical, developmental, and evolutionary psychology, linguistics, cognitive and computational neuroscience, as well as gesture and global health studies, paving the way for a new era of big data-enabled research.