The development of pointing during the first two years of life and across different cultures

The canonical pointing gesture refers to pointing with an extended index finger with an at least slightly extended arm, and with the remaining fingers curled. The occurrence of the pointing gesture is considered as one of the major ontogenetic milestones in the first year of life. Empirical evidence suggests an association between development and frequency of pointing during infancy and several areas of cognitive development, such as vocabulary development and Theory of Mind (Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2009; Sauer et al., 2010; Sodian & Kristen-Antonow, 2015), indicating the importance of the pointing gesture for infant development. While development and purpose of pointing gesture has been the topic of theoretical debates for a long time, research on the early emergence of pointing is scarce. Specifically, one of the questions is how pointing occurs in development, whether it starts as a non-social gesture and becomes to serve a social function as infants get older or whether it has a social purpose from the start. Findings from few previous studies suggest that the pointing gesture first has a non-social purpose, originating for example from infants’ tactile exploration, and during the second half of the first year of life, possibly based on learning about the reactions from significant others, becomes used for social purposes, i.e., as a form of communication (Carpendale & Carpendale, 2010; Paulus et al., in preparation). The main goal of the current study is to assess the theoretical proposal that pointing develops from a non-social use of the index finger and later becomes a social/communicative gesture. On a side note, our study will also test the theoretical proposition of the 9-month revolution during which there is a sudden switch in pointing behavior from mostly non-social to social (Tomasello & Gonzales-Cabrera, 2017). The second goal of this study is to assess whether there are cross-cultural differences in pointing behavior during the first years of life. Whereas cross-cultural evidence on pointing in infants is limited, evidence from adult studies suggests variability in adults’ pointing behavior across cultures ranging from using different body parts for pointing (e.g., lip pointing instead of index finger pointing), pointing being socially inhibited (e.g., not pointing at people, rainbows or with the left hand), and pointing being limited to certain contexts (e.g., pointing only at a specific location instead of pointing at objects as well) (Enfield, 2001; Kita & Essegbey, 2001; Lee & Fraser, 2001; Le Guen, 2011; Levinson, 2003; Wilkins, 2003). Whereas there is limited evidence on cultural differences in pointing behavior, so far the evidence suggests that there might be differences across different cultures in the frequency of infants pointing behavior. For example, Salomo and Liszkowski (2013) demonstrated differences in the frequency of pointing behavior in 8- to 15-month-old infants from Mexico, the Netherlands, and China with the highest frequency of pointing behavior in infants from China, followed by infants from the Netherlands and then Mexico. Authors explained these differences as related to differences in the amount of joint attention between caregivers and infants. Furthermore, another study assessed pointing gestures in infants from 9 to 13 months of age across three different cultures (Canada, India, and Peru) and found that while infants in all three cultures demonstrated pointing gestures, infants from Canada were engaged in pointing gestures more often compared to infants from India (Callaghan et al., 2011). The potential mechanism through which culture might affect pointing behavior in infants as found in the above studies is through differences in the nature of caregiver-infant interaction. Indeed, research evidence suggests cross-cultural differences in parental beliefs about child-rearing (Lancy, 2010; Weisner, 2009), particularly caregivers’ socialization goals regarding independence and interdependence of children in relation to their family (Kagitcibasi, 2005). These, in turn, have been found to affect the quality of caregiver-infant interaction. In the present study we will examine the effect of four different cultural settings (German, Japanese, Turkish, and Chinese) on type (non-social, social) and frequency of infant’s pointing behavior. The cultures were chosen based on labs of researchers who had expressed interest in participating in this study, while trying to maximize diversity between cultures.

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