Child psychologists - and kindergarten teachers
- have long known that when children first show up for school,
some of them speak a lot more fluently than others. Psychologists
also know that children's socioeconomic
status tends to correlate with their language facility.
The better off and more educated a child's parents are, the
more verbal that child tends to be by school age - and vocabulary
skill is a key predictor for success in school. Children from
low-income families, who may often start school knowing significantly
fewer words than their better-off peers, will struggle for years
to make up that ground.
Previous studies have shown that wealthier, educated parents
talk to their young children more, using more complex vocabulary
and syntax, than parents of lesser means. And these differences
may help explain why richer kids start school with richer vocabularies.
But what goes on before children can talk, during that phase
- familiar to any parent - when communication takes the form
of pointing, waving, grabbing and other kinds of baby
sign language? Do well-off parents also gesture more
to their kids?
Indeed they do, say psychologists Susan Goldin-Meadow and Meredith
Rowe of the University
of Chicago, who published a study in the Feb. 13 issue
of Science. The researchers found that at 14 months of
age, babies already showed a wide range of "speaking" ability
through gestures, and that those differences were correlated
with their socioeconomic background and how frequently their
parents used gestures to communicate. High-income, better-educated
parents gestured more frequently to their children to convey
meaning and new concepts, and in turn, their kids gestured more
to them. When researchers tested the same children at 54 months
of age, those early gesturers turned out to have better vocabulary
ability than other students.
"At 14 months, you can't see a difference with their speech,
but you can already see a difference with their gestures," says
Goldin-Meadow, a leading expert on gesture. "And children's
gestures can be traced back to parents' gestures."
Goldin-Meadow and Rowe's study involved children from 50 Chicago-area
families of various ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Annual
incomes ranged from less than $15,000 to more than $100,000,
and parents' educational level ranged from high
school dropout to advanced degree. The researchers videotaped
each child at 14 months with his or her primary caregiver (the
mother, in 49 out of 50 kids) for 90 minutes while the pair
engaged in everyday activities. Those tapes were then transcribed
- all speech and gestures seen during the 90 minutes were noted
and recorded in code.
Researchers were interested less in the number of gestures
a child or parent made than in their variety - for example,
pointing at a doll 10 times would count as only one gesture,
but pointing at a doll and then a bed might count as two. During
the 90-minute session, 14-month-olds from well-off families
used an average of 24 meaningfully different gestures, researchers
found, while children from lower-income families used an average
of just 13.
"As early as 14 months of age, children in different socioeconomic-status
groups may be socialized to communicate more or fewer meanings
via gesture," the authors wrote. And those early differences
in gestures may help predict the later disparities in vocabulary
ability when children show up for school. The current study
found that at 54 months old, children from higher-income families
understood about 117 words on a comprehension test, compared
with 93 for children from lower-income families.
Although Goldin-Meadow is quick to point out that the study
shows only an association, not a causation, among socioeconomic
status, gestures and vocabulary ability, "we do think
there is something going on here," she says. "When parents gesture
around their children, the kids might be picking up the gestures
and doing it themselves."
Here's how: at 14 months of age, pointing toward an object
is the way most kids use gestures. If a parent responds to that
gesture by verbally identifying the object - by saying, "That's
a doll," for example - children get a head start on growing
their nascent vocabularies. "That's a teachable
moment, and mothers are teaching the kids the word for
an object," says Goldin-Meadow. She also believes that lively
gesturing (like clapping) could allow kids to better understand
new concepts (like happiness) simply by giving them a visceral
way to express them.
That last theory offers the possibility that teachers may be
able to use gesture to help school-age kids solidify old ideas
and learn new ones. In separate research, Goldin-Meadow found
that when children were asked to solve and explain a series
of math problems, those who were asked to gesture while they
did so were more likely to learn new problem-solving strategies
and perform better on future math problems than were kids who
did not use gestures. Goldin-Meadow believes that prompting
children to gesture gives them the ability to express ideas
they had never been able to express before. "I'd recommend teachers
encourage their kids to gesture, because it makes them more
receptive to teaching," she says. "It allows teachers to have
a better understanding of what their kids are understanding."
