Gesture and Multimodal development. Ed.

by Jean-Marc Colletta and

Michlle Guidetti. (Benjamins Current Topics 39). Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, 2012. Pp. 223. ISBN 9789027202581. $135 (Hb).

Reviewed by Georgina Lacanna, University of Buenos Aires

The nine articles included in this volume share the same departing point, the definition of
human communication as a multimodal phenomenon and the importance of gesture in the
development of communicative and cognitive skills in children in their preverbal period.
The first three chapters focus on pointing. In Pointing gesture in young children: Hand
preference and language development, Hlne Cochet and Jacques Vauclair describe
several studies in order to show that pointing gestures play a fundamental role in the
development

of

communicative behaviors.

Support

or

competition?:

Dynamic

development of the relationship between manual pointing and symbolic gestures from 6 to
18 months of age, by Claire Vallotton, compares the effects of manual pointing and
symbolic gestures from the perspective of Dynamic Skills Theory. In From gesture to sign
and from gesture to word: Pointing in deaf and hearing children, Aliyah Morgenstern,
Stphanie Cat, Marie Collombel-Leroy, Fanny Limousin, and Marion Blondel
explore comparatively the development of the index finger point in the acquisition of
French spoken language and in French Sign Language, and the combination of pointing
gestures with words and signs. In How the hands control attention during early word
learning, Nancy de Villiers Rader and Patricia Zukow-Goldring present the results of

two experiments on the evaluation of word learning in infants who were exposed to audio
visual stimuli in order to show that the synchrony of gesture and word constitutes a whole
event which would lead to enhanced word learning. Infant movement as a window into
language processing, by Laurel Fais, Julia Leibowich, Ladan Hamadani and Lana
Ohira, compares the infants physical responses in a language and a musical setting in
order to suggest that while language is recognized by the infants as a social activity music
is not. Unlike the preceding papers, the next two contributions stress on gestural motherese.
In Childrens lexical skills and tasks demands affect gestural behavior in mothers of latetalking children and children with typical language development, Angela Grimminger,
Katharina J. Rohlfing and Prisca Stenneken analyze the gestures used by mothers when
they interact with their children and examine how they change in relation to childrens
lexical development. In The type of shared activity shapes caregiver and infant
communication, Daniel Puccini, Mireille Hassemer, Doroth Salomo, and Ulf
Liszkowski focus on two extra-linguistic factors such as the type of shared activity and use
of gestures to describe how they influence the language development of children and also
how they shape the relationship between caregivers and infants. In Transcribing and
annotating multimodality: How deaf childrens productions call into the question the
analytical tools, Agns Millet and Isabelle Estve focus on multimodality of deaf children
in order to propose an analytical tool that considers the different resources deployed in an
utterance as well as the possibility that non-linguistic signals can structure discourse and
thus redefine the units of transcription. In Mathematical learning and gesture: Character
viewpoint and observer viewpoint in students gestured graphs of functions, Susan
Gerofsky considers gestural viewpoint as a key concept in the pedagogy of mathematical
graphs and functions in secondary school.