Vocal gestures in early multimodal communication: A commentary on Karadöller,Sümer and Özyürek

In the target article, the authors give evidence of infants’ use of gestures to support early communication in a speech-plus-gesture model of spoken language acquisition. I propose to extend this account to include ‘vocal gestures’ – that is, early vocal productions that incorporate phonetic, prosodic or phonological features not typical of the target language. These forms have been reported in various case study accounts of early production, and are often highly iconic. I propose that vocal gestures are another component of early multimodal communication, and should be included in our analyses of early speech development.