Developmental Paths of Pointing for Various Motives in Infants with and without Language Delay

Katharina J. Rohlfing, Carina Lüke, Ulf Liszkowski, Ute Ritterfeld and Angela Grimminger
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Katharina J. Rohlfing: Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Paderborn University, 33098 Paderborn, Germany
Carina Lüke: Fakultät für Humanwissenschaften, University of Würzburg, 97074 Würzburg, Germany
Ulf Liszkowski: Institut für Psychologie, University of Hamburg, 20146 Hamburg, Germany
Ute Ritterfeld: Fakultät für Rehabilitationswissenschaften, TU Dortmund University, 44227 Dortmund, Germany
Angela Grimminger: Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Paderborn University, 33098 Paderborn, Germany

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 9, 1-15

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: pointing gestures; pointing motives; developmental paths (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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