This has just been demonstrated by a new Catalan study on the process of language acquisition and development in babies. These are the first results that show how and at what age the coordination patterns between gestures and speech are acquired, two keys to the communicative beginning of humans .
“There is more and more research that shows that the study of language and human communication cannot be carried out with a speech analysis alone ,” explains Núria Esteve Gibert, one of the authors of the study, to the scientific news agency SINC. And it is not necessary to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce that the way of communication of babies goes far beyond babbling and attempts to make sounds.
To carry out their study, the researchers videotaped four babies as they played with their parents from almost one year of age until they were 19 months old. Thanks to these recordings they were able to verify that during the transition stage between the babbling period and the first words (that is, before the baby is able to produce two words together one after the other) is when the gestural and speech system they are already closely related .
According to the authors, this research shows that to study human communication it is not only necessary to focus on speech, but also that gestures play a very important role in development .
In fact, they point out that there is increasing evidence that both fields develop simultaneously and that they are highly coordinated both semantically and temporally. In fact, as Esteve Gilbert points out, “already in the first combinations of gesture with vocalization, the temporal coordination pattern of both modalities – which consists of synchronizing the most prominent time interval in the deictic gesture with the most prominent time interval prominent in vocalization) – it is very similar to that of adults ”.
The results obtained by the researchers from the Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona have been published in the journal Speech Communication .
