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January 2023: LSA Presentation

At the Linguistic Society of America meeting in Denver, I gave a presentation titled “What causes the asymmetry between index and open-hand pointing in L1 acquisition?”. I was pleased to co-deliver this talk with my undergraduate student Alejandra González (Cornell).

The abstract for this talk reads:

For Western children, index-finger (IX) pointing gestures predict many measures of language development, but open-hand (OH) points do not. Does this reflect innate associations between IX and language (Liszkowski & Tomasello 2008) or learned, culturally specific gestural conventions? To answer, we investigated the gestures of 45 children acquiring the Amazonian language Ticuna. Like Ticuna adults, children produced IX and OH points with similar frequency; showed no unique relationship between IX frequency and language development; and displayed no greater bias toward IX points during contingent talk.  This evidence suggests that developmental asymmetries between OH and IX pointing arise largely from learned gestural conventions.

Download the talk slides here.

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