Gesture-speech combinations and early verbal abilities new longitudinal data during the second year of age

This study provides new longitudinal evidence on two major types of gesture- speech combination that play different roles in children's early language. We analysed the spontaneous production of 10 Italian children observed monthly from 10-12 to 23-25 months of age. We evaluated the extent to which the developmental trends observed in children's early gesture-word and word-word productions can predict subsequent verbal abilities. The results indicate that "complementary" and "supplementary" gesture-speech combinations predict subsequent language development in a different manner: While the onset of "supplementary" combinations predicts the onset of two-word combinations, the use of "complementary" combinations at 12 and 18 months predicts the vocabulary and the ability to produce more words utterances at 2 years of age. Moreover, the results suggest that both "complementary" and "supplementary" crossmodal combinations are good predictive indexes of early verbal skills during the second year of age. © John Benjamins Publishing Company.