Embracing multiple languages and cultures across the lifespan

Babies start communicating with us from day one. The sounds they utter will become increasable intelligible: from cooing, to babbling, to monosyllable, bi-syllables up to sentences. The journey of language development in babies and infants is quick and has many facets. What many parents forget to consider is that gestures play an important role in the language development of infants.

When parents ask me how to help their children become verbal, I usually ask many questions about the non verbal communication between them and their babies. We are so focussed on verbal communication when it comes to our children’s language development, that we forget the non verbal one, which is very important and will evolve and develop alongside the verbal one across our whole lifespan.
Our infants can understand gestures very early on. They need to gain the motor skills to be able to coordinate their hands, their fingers, to imitate the movements we make.

Parents who use baby sign language, which is a more conventionalized signing where signs are closely linked with words, observe that communication with their infants seems to be more intense and effective than with their other children with whom they didn’t use baby sign language (this is the observation from parents I work with).

The importance of gestures for language acquisition

Around 10 months of age, children start using gestures in a deictic way, which means that they point fingers or use another body part to single out an object of interest.
Gestures are used by children across cultures to express their desires, share their experiences, draw attention and refer to things.
Pointing is a gesture used to communicate. The same way, other gestures and body language is used, like waving to say bye-bye, lifting arms to be carried, stamping feet when upset, clapping hands when excited etc.

Using gestures is something we intuitively teach our children and we can use gestures, explore the possibilities of using gestures to facilitate early communication.

Here you can find a list of the 11 distinct pointing development milestones from birth to two years old.

From gesture to verbal use of language

When parents ask me why their children are not speaking (yet), why they seem not to find any interest in uttering words, I usually ask them to describe a typical conversation with their children for example at the dinner table.
How are their children communicating what they want? Do they point at objects, nod or shake their heads, use facial expressions?

Parents are very good at understanding what their children want, without them needing to use words. Especially when children use a sequence of gestures and body language to communicate with us. “At eleven months of age, some children can produce a sequence of 2 gestures to convey a message (…) by twelve months of age (…) they begin to produce 3-gestures in sequence” (Ishino 2011).

Gestures play an important role in the natural development of spoken language. In hearing children, language and gesture develop in interaction with each other if they are used together. Therefore it is important that we link gestures with words.

How to help a child become verbal

If our children seem to exclusively (or mainly) communicate through gestures, we can help them increase their use of sounds and words by modeling what words we expect them to use in certain circumstances.

For example, if they point at an object, we may want to accompany their gesture with comments.
If our children point at a cup of milk on the table because they would like to drink, we would say
“Do you want to drink milk?” – they might nod, or shake the head, maybe stomp their feet.

While helping them reach the cup or giving it to them, we should make eye contact and repeat “milk” “drink” in several sentences. If we notice that the children are not responding with a smile a nod or other kind of reaction, we can get their attention by varying the intonation of our words. Sometimes a higher pitch – or a lower pitch – can do the trick. Or repeating a word in a fun way “milk, milk, milk”.

Especially when we see that our children are reluctant speakers, we can try to increase our own use of words, and gently model what we expect our children to start saying.
During this whole transition process between gestures and verbal expressions, we should stay calm and patient. Every child develops at their very own pace. We might need to repeat some words many more frequently, over a longer period of time until our children start trying to articulate them: they’ll all get there in the end!

I know that this period in language development is not an easy one for many parents. It seems like speaking with a wall, and we are very impatient to hear our children speak, to have our first conversations. If we consider gestures, body language already as a form of communication, it is easier to translate the gestures into words and to embrace this phase.

As I work with multilingual families, I find it very interesting to see how gestures change when switching from one language to the other, and how very young children can do this switch even before becoming verbal!

The most important thing in this whole process is to acknowledge the steps we make.

Enjoy all your languages when communicating with each other!

– Is your child using gestures? Are you using baby sign language with your baby or infant? How is this working for you and your multilingual family? Please let me know in the comments!

I invite you to watch the interview with Roya Caviglia:

Cochet, Helene; Vauclair, Jacques (2012), “Pointing gesture in young children: Hand preference and language development”, in Colletta, Jean-Marc; Guidetti, Michele (eds.). Gesture and Multimodal Development. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. pp. 7–26.

Fasolo, Mirco; D’Odorico, Laura (2012), “Gesture-plus-word combinations, transitional forms, and language development”. Gesture, (12), pp. 1–15.

Gullberg, Marianne; Kees de Bot (2008), Gestures in language development, Gesture, 8(2).

Ishino, Mika; Stam, Gale (2011), Integrating Gestures : The Interdisciplinary Nature of Gesture. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co, pp. 111–112.

Iverson, Jana M.; Goldin-Meadow, Susan (2005-05-01), “Gesture Paves the Way for Language Development”, Psychological Science, 16 (5): 367–371.

Kendon, Adam; Gullberg, Marianne; Seyfeddinipur, Mandana (2014), From Gesture In Conversation To Visible Action As Utterance: Essays In Honor Of Adam Kendon. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, p. 332.

Vallotton, Claire (2012), “Support or competition? Dynamic development of the relationship between manual pointing and symbolic gestures from 6 to 18 months of age”, in Colletta, Jean-Marc; Guidetti, Michele (eds.). Gesture and Multimodal Development. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. pp. 27–48.

When children grow up with multiple languages they not only acquire words from different languages, they also learn different gestures.

A healthy communication development starts in the first year of life and consists not only in becoming verbal – i.e. articulating sounds and acquiring that sound-chains can have a meaning and connect with objects, people and concepts in the world around us – but also in using gestures and facial expressions. It has its roots in social interaction with parents and other caregivers during everyday activities.

For multilingual families this means that we have to make sure to communicate with our children in the different home languages with a certain consistency so that our children can copy the sounds we make and the gestures we use.

By observing our children’s acquisition and use of gestures, we can get an impression of what their overall communication development looks and might look like in the future.

Research with young children indicates that the development of gestures from 9 to 16 months predicts language ability two years later, which is significant because preschool language skills predict academic success. So it’s important to remember that by 16 months, children should have at least 16 gestures. – On the Reading Rockets website you can find an interesting pdf file with 16 Gestures by 16 months.

I am always cautious when it comes to advice like the one that by 16 months, children should have at least 16 gestures. Every child is different and family situations are unique. Furthermore, languages and cultures differ in communication styles, also with regard to gestures. Some gestures are used in different languages and seem to be universal, but they can slightly or highly differ in their meaning.

The typical American sign of “thumbs up” for example, or the “hand up” sign for “wait” seem to be perfectly acceptable in some Western cultures, but they are not in Eastern countries and languages or Greece (for the wait sign). Sings vary across cultures and it is advisable to get informed about the signs our partner uses with our children and agree on what we want and can introduce and what not.

Families who raise children with multiple languages, focus on multiple communication verbal and non-verbal styles.

In this context it would be interesting to study the use of baby-sign language and the effect it has on the infant and toddler’s acquisition of gestures and verbal language.*

If your child happens to be between 9 and 16 months old when you read this, it would be interesting if you could take pictures or write a log-book about the signs he or she makes. – I’d be very interested in knowing about these milestones as it is something I missed taking notes about when my children where that age.

I recall one particular milestone of son at age 2,8 years, that I mention in my intercultural communication classes when I talk about non-verbal communication: we just moved from Italy to the Netherlands and my son was used to hear and speak more Italian and used some Italian gestures already. Among these, the sign stai attento / guarda…! = sei nei guai (be careful / = you are in trouble) was one of his favourite. It was impressive to notice that within a few weeks in a Dutch daycare, he switched from the Italian hand gesture to the Dutch one lekker lekker, to signify yummy, yummy.

When a parent asked me what to watch out for about her daughter’s language development in this pre-verbal phase, while acquiring Arabic and Italian. I suggested her to decide with her husband what gestures are important for both languages and won’t lead to misunderstandings or embarrassing situations, to observe her daughter and not to worry as long as the daughter is making some kind of progress.

What should us make reach out for help is, when there is a long stagnation in the development or a noticeable regression, and there is no apparent reason for it, eg. a transition or change, like the birth of a sibling, a move, but also changes that for us seem minor but can mean a world to our little ones. Whenever parents start to worry, it is advisable to ask an expert and find out what might be the cause.

Good communication skills are the best tool to prevent behavior problems and make it easier to work through moments of frustration that all infants and toddlers face.

* Please have a look at Roya Caviglia’s Infant Communication Baby Sign Language Courses

Further readings

This is an article in Italian that explains the meaning of baby’s body-language

Tag Archives: gestures

The importance of gestures in the language development of babies and infants

First multilingual non-verbal communication milestones