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Children gesture when speech is slow to come

Abstract

Human conversation is marked by alternation–partners takingturns speaking and listening. Consequently, language produc-tion happens under time pressure; speakers who cannot gettheir message out quickly enough lose their turn. When adultshave struggle to retrieve the words they want to say, they canchoose alternatives. But children just beginning to learn lan-guage may solve this problem with gesture. If young children’sproduction systems reflect a sensitivity to communicative pres-sure, they should use deictic gesture to refer when they cannotretrieve a lexical label quickly enough. We confirm this pre-diction in a longitudinal corpus of naturalistic parent-child in-teractions, showing that the frequency and recency of a wordin children’s input predict the probability that they will refer toits referent with gesture, even for words they know.

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