ABSTRACT
Charles Darwin better remembered today as the man who formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection, contributed his own diary study of language development in 1877. Although the emphasis at the beginning of the renaissance was primarily upon syntactic development, research expanded to include semantic and phonological development, the precursors of language in the preverbal child, the mastery of conversational skill and so on, making the modern scene harder to summarize in a few pages but at the same time truer to the complex reality of learning to communicate. Returning to the development of the typical, average child, mentioned earlier Lock's hypothesis that combining gestures and nonverbal vocalizations, and somehow prefigures the combining of message elements in simple two-word sentences. Little research has been done on gestural communication in older children. It is clear, however, that even school-age children can involve gestures extensively in their communication.
