Offering and showing gestures in 12- to 15-month-old infants in natural contexts: a corpus-based study
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Developmental theories propose that the ontogeny of sharing behaviour builds on earlier emerging social routines of offering objects in caregiver–child interactions. The current study explored the occurrence of offering and showing behaviour in naturalistic contexts, and how caregivers react to these gestures. To this end, we relied on video recordings of spontaneous infant–caregiver interactions from two CHILDES corpora. We analysed data of six infants from 12 to 15 months comprising 222 tokes of gestures. Across ages, infants showed more offering behaviour than showing behaviour. Caregivers responded vocally to both types of gestures and showed more object-directed action in the context of the offering gesture. Showing behaviour was thus more likely to lead to a unimodal reaction, whereas offering behaviour more often led to a bimodal reaction from caregivers. Overall, the study provides evidence for how infant gestures, and the early precursors of sharing behaviour, develop in the context of naturalistic caregiver–child interactions.
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4408872775