Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper, we explore the cultural differences in theproduction of speech and speech+gesture combinations byinfants at the age of 17-18 months in Mozambique and theNetherlands. We found that Dutch infants produce morespeech and gestures compared to Mozambican infants. Infantsin both communities make most use of content words. Theresults further show that Dutch infants make more use ofproximal pointing than Mozambicans, whereas Mozambicansmake more use of the offering gesture. Finally, the amount ofsemantically coherent speech+gesture combinations of theMozambican infants is higher than of the Dutch infants