Erken iletişim gelişiminde işaret etme davranışınının yordayıcıları ve sonuçları: Çocuğa yönelik etkileşimlerden jestlere ve kelimelere

Human infants start pointing with their index-fingers by 10 to 14 months. However, social and cognitive origins of pointing gestures and the predictive role of pointing for early language are relatively unexplored. To elicit pointing in a constrained context from infants and their mothers, we used a semi-observational Decorated Room paradigm (Brown & Liszkowski, 2007). Additionally, we used a Point Following experiment (Mundy, 2003) to assess infants' ability to follow direction of adults' points to different locations; measured fine-motor skills using the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (Mullen, 1995); and collected maternal reports on infants' receptive and expressive language development using the Turkish Communicative Developmental Inventory (T-CDI) (Aksu-Koç, Küntay, Acarlar, Maviş, Sofu, Topbaş, & Turan, 2011).35 mother-infant dyads (20 high-educated and 15 low-educated mothers) visited the lab three times when their infants were at 8, 10 and 12 months of age. We found that maternal education was not associated with the age of onset of infant pointings, the frequency of infant and mother pointings, and the infants' point following performance. Only a trend was found for infants with high maternal education to score higher in the fine-motor skills task than their agemates with low maternal education. Binary logistic regressions revealed that the increasing frequency of mothers' index finger pointings at 8 months increased the probability of infant pointing at 10 months. Infants who already started to point by at 10 months, in turn, more frequently followed the experimenter's pointings at 12 months. Correctly following the referent of pointing gestures at 12 months was associated with larger receptive vocabulary for action words at 12 months over and beyond maternal pointing frequency. We discuss these findings by suggesting that pointing is a dynamically developing communicative system, where several socio-cognitive variables interact to predict its time of emergence and frequency of display. We further argue that the relations between point following and point production, and the relations between pointing and early language development, are bidirectionally associative. Keywords: Pointing; Gestures; Preverbal Communication; Early Word Learning; Parent- Child Interaction