ABSTRACT
At the one-word stage children use gesture to supplement their speech, and the onset of such supplementary gesture-speech combinations predicts the onset of two-word speech. Gesture thus signals a child’s readiness to produce two-word constructions. One possibility is that gesture continues to be a forerunner of linguistic change as children flesh out their skeletal constructions by adding arguments. Interestingly, the age at which children first produce supplementary gesture-speech combinations of this sort reliably predicts the age at which they first produce two-word utterances. Gesture plays a distinctive role during the early stages of language development. Supplementary gesture-speech combinations and multi-word combinations were categorised into three types according to the types of semantic elements conveyed: multiple arguments without a predicate, a predicate with at least one argument, and multiple predicates with or without arguments. Gesture and speech form a semantically and temporally integrated system in adult communications in spite of the fact that each modality represents meaning in different ways.
