A look at the normal development of Pointing and Reaching Gestures in 12-16-Month-Old Farsi-Speaking Children: A Longitudinal Study

OBJECTIVES: Human beings can use gestures such as pointing and reaching to communicate with others before they have the ability to use verbal communication to produce speech. Given the importance of children's communication development and the key role of gestures development in communicating, the main purpose of this study was to analyze the normal development of pointing and reaching gestures and their relationship in 12-16-month-old children speaking Farsi. MATERIALS & METHODS: In this prospective, observational and longitudinal study the gestures of 11 monolingual Farsi-speaking children (7 boys and 4 girls, from Oct 2015 to Jan 2017 in the homes of participants across Tehran, Iran) were evaluated via non-randomized sampling method. Child-mother interactions were videotaped monthly in a semi-structured context to capture the emergence and consistent use of targeted gestures. Afterward, the data were coded and statistically analyzed for this purpose Repetitive measured; independent t-test and Pearson correlation were used. RESULTS: The mean of the pointing gesture increased significantly from 12 to 16 months (P<0.05). However, this was not significant for the reaching gesture. Moreover, there was no relationship between pointing and reaching gestures. CONCLUSION: Pointing gestures increase with age from 12-16 months in Farsi-speaking children. However, reaching gestures stay the same between 12-16 months of age. The study provided rich details of common gestures that children use to signal their intentions before verbal communication.