TY  - JOUR
A1  - Rohlfing, Katharina J.
A1  - Lüke, Carina
A1  - Liszkowski, Ulf
A1  - Ritterfeld, Ute
A1  - Grimminger, Angela
T1  - Developmental paths of pointing for various motives in infants with and without language delay
T2  - International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
N2  - Pointing is one of the first conventional means of communication and infants have various motives for engaging in it such as imperative, declarative, or informative. Little is known about the developmental paths of producing and understanding these different motives. In our longitudinal study (N = 58) during the second year of life, we experimentally elicited infants' pointing production and comprehension in various settings and under pragmatically valid conditions. We followed two steps in our analyses and assessed the occurrence of canonical index-finger pointing for different motives and the engagement in an ongoing interaction in pursuit of a joint goal revealed by frequency and multimodal utterances. For understanding the developmental paths, we compared two groups: typically developing infants (TD) and infants who have been assessed as having delayed language development (LD). Results showed that the developmental paths differed according to the various motives. When comparing the two groups, for all motives, LD infants produced index-finger pointing 2 months later than TD infants. For the engagement, although the pattern was less consistent across settings, the frequency of pointing was comparable in both groups, but infants with LD used less canonical forms of pointing and made fewer multimodal contributions than TD children.
KW  - pointing gestures
KW  - pointing motives
KW  - developmental paths
Y1  - 2022
UR  - https://opus.bibliothek.uni-wuerzburg.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/27072
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-270727
SN  - 1660-4601
VL  - 19
IS  - 9
ER  -