The Role of Gesture in the Establishment of Symbolic Abilities: Continuities and Discontinuities in Early Language Development

Language develops in infancy as emerging cognitive abilities come on-line to handle the infant's experience of the world, and thereby enrich it. The attentional and motivational structuring of that experience is elaborated in the course of social interaction, but from a base in the a priori values that 'being an infant' create as to what infants find 'interesting' in their experiential worlds. There is a continuity of experience, but a reworking of it that yields apparently discontinuous stages. These stages do not map onto traditional notions such as preverbal stage, one-word stage, and combinatorial stage, but are more appropriately captured as presymbolic, symbolic, and propositional. Thus, some early word uses are pre-symbolic, and some later non-verbal gestures are propositional: that the production media might differ for words versus gestures does not appear to be a fact of major significance.