Researcher(s)
- Isabela March, Cognitive Science, University of Delaware
Faculty Mentor(s)
- Giovanna Morini, Communication Sciences & Disorders, University of Delaware
Abstract
According to the 2024 U.S. Census, over 44.9 million people in the United States aged 5 years and older speak Spanish at home. However, child language research remains disproportionately focused on English-only speakers. This limits the knowledge/implementation of evidence-based practices for speech-language pathologists, teachers, and caregivers to fully support children from linguistically diverse backgrounds. Caregivers’ gestures play a crucial role in children’s language development by providing supportive guidance for vocabulary, sentence complexity, and referential language. Gestures used by caregivers directly aid such development. Previous work has shown that gesture use varies across cultures and linguistic contexts. This project seeks to fill this gap by using a within-subjects design to investigate how gesture-modality patterns (gestures occurring with/without speech) differ during caregiver-child play across three dyad conditions: (i) monolingual English, (ii) bilingual Spanish-English (Spanish session), and (iii) bilingual Spanish-English (English session). Twenty toddler-caregiver dyads (children: 36–48 months) participated in play sessions, which were coded for both gesture type (deictic, conventional, representational, and beat) and speech presence. Preliminary results showed similar English-language gesture patterns between bilingual and monolingual caregivers, with comparable proportions of deictic (47.7% vs. 47.5%) and representational gestures (20.9% vs. 19.0%). A generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) examined gesture counts as a function of Gesture Type×Speech Presence×Language Condition. Preliminary GLMM results indicated that gesture production was significantly greater in speech-present than speech-absent contexts (β = 2.06, p < .001). Gesture type influenced frequency, with fewer beat than deictic gestures (β = −1.81, p = .002). A significant Speech×Language interaction indicated that the relationship between gesture production and speech differed between English and Spanish sessions (β = 1.33, p = .036). Preliminary results suggest that caregiver gesture-speech patterns may vary across bilingual language contexts, highlighting the importance of considering language context in studies of early communication.