ABSTRACT

During the autumn of 2002, just a few weeks before we would discover about her disease, Liz and I were walking through Rome, talking about work and a dream we had. We wanted to write something together again, something about gesture-a topic in which we had been interested since we started our lifelong collaboration and profound friendship, about thirty years ago. We were aware that many of our old ideas about the role of gesture in children’s linguistic development were suddenly becoming extremely “modern” and we were planning to articulate our current perspective (old and new at the same time) by doing a critical review of recent work carried on in different laboratories and countries.