ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the learning of language and addresses the question of how children can communicate via gestures from an early age and how gestures, being a part of a learning situation, can enhance memories about the learning content. It reviews a differentiation between gestural types and describes a key feature of gestures, namely, their coordination with other modalities and with the dialogue partner and explains for why gestures support learning. For learning taking place within social interaction, however, assigning this behavior to a particular type is of less importance. In the long term, early interactions provide a rich learning environment in which learners are given the opportunity to wrap up a package of features that are necessary to remember individual words through reference to an object or event. Children who saw the referent being illuminated retained words at greater than chance level compared to children who saw the referent introduced via a pointing gesture.
