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
JF  - 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
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-270727
SN  - 1660-4601
VL  - 19
IS  - 9
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Lüke, Carina
A1  - Ritterfeld, Ute
A1  - Liszkowski, Ulf
T1  - In bilinguals' hands: identification of bilingual, preverbal infants at risk for language delay
JF  - Frontiers in Pediatrics
N2  - Studies with monolingual infants show that the gestural behavior of 1–2-year-olds is a strong predictor for later language competencies and, more specifically, that the absence of index-finger pointing at 12 months seems to be a valid indicator for risk of language delay (LD). In this study a lack of index-finger pointing at 12 months was utilized as diagnostic criterion to identity infants with a high risk for LD at 24 months in a sample of 42 infants growing up bilingually. Results confirm earlier findings from monolinguals showing that 12-month-olds who point with the extended index finger have an advanced language status at 24 months and are less likely language delayed than infants who only point with the whole hand and do not produce index-finger points at 12 months.
KW  - gesture
KW  - pointing
KW  - language delay
KW  - language acquisition
KW  - bilingualism
Y1  - 2022
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:bvb:20-opus-276639
SN  - 2296-2360
VL  - 10
ER  -