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Research
Cite this article: Salter G, Carpenter M. 2022
Showing and giving: from incipient to
conventional forms. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 377:
20210102.
https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0102
Received: 14 October 2021
Accepted: 9 March 2022
One contribution of 14 to a theme issue
‘Revisiting the human ‘interaction engine’:
comparative approaches to social action
coordination’.
Subject Areas:
behaviour, cognition
Keywords:
gesture, showing, giving, development, infancy
Author for correspondence:
Gideon Salter
e-mail: gs213@st-andrews.ac.uk
Electronic supplementary material is available
online at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.
c.6038194.
Showing and giving: from incipient to
conventional forms
Gideon Salter and Malinda Carpenter
School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews, Scotland, UK
GS, 0000-0003-0068-8901; MC, 0000-0003-3983-2034
Understanding humans’motivation and capacity for social interaction
requires understanding communicative gestures. Gestures are one of the
earliest means that infants employ to communicate with others, and
showing and giving are among the earliest-emerging gestures. However,
there are limited data on the processes that lead up to the emergence of
conventional showing and giving gestures. This study aimed to provide
such data. Twenty-five infants were assessed longitudinally at monthly
intervals from 6 to 10 months of age using a variety of methods (elicitation
procedures, free play observations and maternal interviews), as well as via
questionnaires conducted at 11–12 months. A particular focus was on pre-
conventional, incipient gestures, behaviours that involved some components
of conventional gestures, but lacked other important components. We
present observational evidence that at least some of these behaviours
(observed as early as 7 months of age) were communicative and make the
case for how conventional showing and giving may emerge gradually in
the context of social interactions. We also discuss the influence of maternal
interpretations of these early behaviours on their development. Overall,
the study seeks to draw attention to the importance of understanding the
cognitive, motor and interactional processes that lead to the emergence of
infants’earliest communicative gestures.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Revisiting the human ‘interaction
engine’: comparative approaches to social action coordination’.
1. Showing and giving: from incipient to conventional forms
Understanding the human ‘interaction engine’[1] requires understanding the
development of communicative gestures. If Levinson [1] is indeed correct that
human interactions are unique, based on a capacity for cooperative and reciprocal
engagement that is not dependent on language, then it is necessary to understand
the kinds of behaviours that appear in some of humans’ontogenetically earliest
interactions, before infants have produced their first words.
Communicative gestures are among the earliest ways in which infants can
initiate joint attention and communicate with others [2,3]. Much previous work
has focused on pointing gestures [3–6], and many researchers have discussed
the interplay of maturation and socialization that leads to the emergence of
conventional pointing gestures [7–13]. However, if we want to understand the
very beginnings of gestural communication, we need to investigate other key,
earlier-emerging gestures such as showing and giving [14–18]. Showing involves
holding up objects so that others can see them [14], and giving involves placing
and releasing an object into another’s hand [19]. These gestures typically first
emerge at around 9 to 10 months, typically before pointing [2,3,14], and,
like pointing, they are associated with later language [18,20]. It is therefore strik-
ing that there is so little research on the development of these earlier-emerging
communicative gestures.
For the emergence of showing gestures, the literature is particularly sparse.
Although several studies have documented when showing emerges in its
© 2022 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original
author and source are credited.
conventional form [2,3,14,15], none has explored where
showing comes from developmentally. By contrast, some
studies have explored the development of giving gestures.
Carpendale et al. [21] reported diary entries in which care-
givers described the giving behaviours of their children
from 7.5 months to 2 years, 6 months of age. They reported
some descriptions of behaviours that preceded conventional
giving gestures. For example, caregivers reported infants
putting food or other objects into the caregiver’s mouth as
an early form of giving. Other studies have highlighted the
role of give-and-take interactions in giving development,
using case studies [22,23], observations [24] and experiments
[19,25]. For example, Xu et al. [19] demonstrated the influence
of social experience on the development of giving in response
to a request. They compared two one- to two-week inter-
ventions in which 7.5-month-old infants either engaged
in give-and-take interactions with their caregiver or had
experience of putting a toy into a bucket. Only the interactive
intervention led to a significant increase in giving, and infants
in the interactive condition gave objects significantly more
than those in the bucket condition.
In understanding the developmental pathway to conven-
tional gestures, it is important to establish the key features that
mark a gesture as conventional. Broadly speaking, conventions
are reliable patterns in social interaction that facilitate communi-
cation and coordination [26]. Conventional gestures are
recognizable by caregivers, with a consistent behavioural form
that is used regularly and predictably in communicative con-
texts [2]. Importantly, they are also recognizable by members
of the community beyond the caregiver–infant dyad [2].
The current study explores the very beginnings of infants’
early showing and giving gestures, focusing on where
they come from developmentally, and the transition from
pre-conventional to conventional forms. That is, conventional
showing and giving do not emerge without developmental
precedent, so we examined related behaviours—partial,
attempted, unclear or idiosyncratic forms of the gesture—that
emerged in infants before conventional showing and giving.
We label these forms incipient gestures. Our aim was not just
to document these earlier incipient forms, but also to explore
how they relate to the emergence of conventional forms.
We also considered whether infants intended them to be com-
municative, presenting evidence that some of these incipient
gestures were accompanied by classic signs of intentional com-
munication, like eye contact, and were not just random
behaviours that coincidentally resembled showing and
giving in some ways. Through maternal interview data, we
also considered the role that caregiver interpretations might
play in the development of these conventional gestures.
Data for this study were taken from a larger study on
the development of joint attention and communication by
Salter [27]. One aim of the larger study was to catch the
very beginnings of communication; thus, we focused on
6- to 10-month-old infants. Longitudinal observations of
25 infants’behaviours were made from experimental tasks
designed to elicit communicative gestures, as well as free
play interactions between mothers and infants. This provided
a range of contexts for observation, while also, in the former
case, providing situations in which the response of the
recipient was controlled and did not involve the scaffolding
typically provided by caregivers [8]. Maternal reports, taken
from semi-structured interviews that included questions
about the development of gestures, were also examined.
Understanding what caregivers interpret as gestures, or poss-
ible gestures, is relevant for two main reasons. First, it
provides insight into the kinds of behaviours that produce
responses from caregivers, and thus that serve as an input
into the cycles of interactive engagement that have been high-
lighted as a key facet of social development [8,22]. Second,
caregivers have a large number of opportunities to engage
with and observe their infant, in a range of social situations
[28]. Thus, they are uniquely positioned to observe subtle
and gradual developmental changes and infrequently-
occurring behaviours [7]. Observational data were collected
and interviews were conducted monthly when infants were
6–10 months old, and caregivers remotely provided further
information through questionnaires at 11–12 months.
2. Method
(a) Participants
Twenty-five mother–infant dyads participated (14 female infants,
11 male; 14 firstborns; all full term). This sample size was based
on previous similar studies (e.g. [3,14]). Of the 23 infants whose
mothers provided information about educational background,
20 had at least one parent who had completed tertiary education,
and 3 had at least one parent who had completed secondary edu-
cation. No further information on SES or ethnicity was collected,
though all mothers were fluent English speakers (the tasks and
interviews were all conducted in English). Sessions were con-
ducted in the laboratory within a week of infants’monthly
birthdays, once a month from 6 to 10 months, and only one
infant missed a single session (at 10 months). Because the focus
of the larger study was on the very beginnings of joint attention
and communication, the laboratory sessions were only conducted
from 6 to 10 months. Follow-up questionnaires were provided at
11 and 12 months to provide information about the further
development of participants’joint attention and communication.
(b) Procedure
The overall study of which the gesture procedures were a part
involved a number of different tasks (e.g. joint attention, attention
following and imitation). The session started with a 6 min mother–
infant free play period, followed by the experimental tasks
(including the gesture tasks), followed by the maternal interview.
(i) Showing
Showing gestures were examined in two experimental procedures
and the free play period. The two experimental procedures were
conducted in random order before and after, respectively, the
other tasks taking place at the session, and followed a similar
format. Infants sat on a mat in front of their mother, facing the
experimenter (E), who kneeled in front of them approximately
1 m away. E gave infants a toy (e.g. a rubber, plastic or soft toy)
and then left the room, at which point mothers had been instructed
to either swap the toy for a new toy, or just sit with infants for 10 s.
This created two situations in which a showing gesture could be
encouraged; one in which infants might share an object that had
previously been shared with E [29], and one in which they might
share an object that had not previously been shared with E [6]. E
returned after the swap or after 10 s. He again kneeled 1 m in
front of infants and greeted them. He then verbally expressed inter-
est either in the toy (in the task in which it was swapped: ‘Wow!’;
‘That’s cool!’;‘Can you show me the toy?’) or in infants (in the
other task: ‘Hello!’;‘How are you?’;‘Are you having fun?’). Each
of these three utterances was repeated, with a 5 s pause between
each utterance. Whether the infant had produced a showing
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2
gesture or not, E then waited a further few seconds, with a neutral
but pleasant expression, before moving on to the rest of the session.
In the free play, mothers and infants were positioned facing
each other, with infants either sitting independently or upright
in an infant seat for the first half, and then positioned however
the mother wanted in the second half (sitting independently or
lying). They were given a bag containing a range of different
toys (e.g. rattle, board book and rubber bath toys). Mothers
were asked to interact with infants as they typically would at
home.
(ii) Giving
Giving gestures were examined in a single experimental task.
Infants sat in an infant chair opposite E, who sat on the floor,
such that the infants’and E’s eyes were at approximately the
same level. Between them was a small table. Infants were
given a small rubber toy (e.g. frog or ball). E allowed infants to
explore the toy briefly, then extended his hand towards infants
with a palm-up gesture, and requested the object, saying, ‘Hi
[infant’s name], can I have the toy, please?’He did this up to
three times, pausing for 5 s between each repetition. If infants
clearly released the object into his hand, E thanked them and
the task ended. If infants had not done so after the third request,
E continued with the rest of the session.
Giving was not coded from the free play. We were interested
in understanding infants’capabilities, and it was difficult to
determine these in free play as mothers frequently intervened
to take the objects before it was possible to identify whether
infants would release the object themselves. It is important to
note that this means that the giving gestures were elicited, not
spontaneous. However, infants’successful responses indicated
an understanding of the request and the ability to produce a
giving gesture.
(iii) Maternal interviews
Each month, E asked mothers questions as part of a semi-
structured interview that covered a range of topics relating to
their infant’s development. Two of these questions focused
on gestures:
‘Does your infant produce any gestures? If so, what kind of
gestures?’
‘Does your infant show you interesting objects? If so, how do
they do this?’
As needed, E asked follow-up questions, such as asking about
infants’giving or pointing gestures. The interviews were tran-
scribed. When infants were 11 and 12 months old, mothers
were also sent an online questionnaire that included a number
of interview questions, including the two listed above.
(c) Coding
Coding of both showing and giving followed the same con-
ceptual structure, which distinguished conventional from
incipient gestures; table 1. The electronic supplementary material
contains the full coding scheme for each gesture type (sections S1
and S2) and information on inter-rater reliability (table S1).
The definitions of showing and giving were broadly in line
with previous work (e.g. [14,17]), but with some additional stipu-
lations. For conventional showing (a score of ‘2’), infants had to
raise the object into the view of the adult, keep it stably in place
for at least 1 s and look to both the adult’s face and the object. For
a score of ‘2’, the coders had to be confident that the act was pro-
duced to draw the adult’s attention to the target object. For
conventional giving, infants had to place the object in E’s hand
and release it such that the object remained in E’s hand.
3. Results and discussion
(a) Showing
Figure 1 presents the percentage of infants who received each
score as their highest score for showing gestures at each
month, collapsed across both showing tasks and free play.
The first infant to produce a conventional showing gesture
was 8 months old, in the free play. The number of infants
who produced conventional showing gestures then increased
steadily, with 13 out of 25 infants (52%) having produced a
conventional show at least once by 10 months. Focusing on
incipient gestures, the first infant to produce an incipient
show was 7 months old, in the free play. Overall, 18 out of
25 infants (72%) had produced at least one incipient showing
gesture by 10 months. For individual participants’scores, see
electronic supplementary material, figure S1. For information
on experimental versus free play scores, see electronic
supplementary material, figure S2.
In all cases, the behaviours that were coded as incipient
shows were behaviours that met all but one component of
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
678
age (months)
910
percentage of infants who received each score
score: 0: no show 1: incipient show 2: conventional show
Figure 1. Percentages of infants who received scores of ‘0’,‘1’and ‘2’as their
highest score for showing gestures at each month.
Table 1. Conceptual structure of gesture coding schemes (see electronic
supplementary material, sections S1 and S2 for the detailed coding
scheme for each gesture type).
score description
2 Infants produced a conventional instance of the target
gesture.
1 Infants produced an attempt at the target gesture, a
partial instance of the gesture, or otherwise relevant
behaviour that involved components of the target
gesture but that was missing one or more key
components. This code includes behaviours that may
possibly be considered an instance of the conventional
gesture, but cannot be confidently assigned as such.
0 Infants did not produce a gesture or other relevant
action.
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3
the criteria for conventional showing gestures. For example,
infants held the toy up towards the adult’s face, with gaze
alternation, but did not hold it high enough, or sufficiently
stably, or they held it up stably but did not look at the
adult, or did not look at the object.
The key question is how to interpret these behaviours.
There are at least two possible interpretations, each ascribing
different capacities to the infants. The first interpretation is
that these behaviours are non-communicative and are either
unrelated to conventional shows, or potentially serve as
interactional triggers that elicit relevant caregiver responses.
The second interpretation is that these behaviours are commu-
nicative, but not yet conventional. On this reading, the infants
intend to show objects, but cannot yet do so conventionally due
to limited motor and/or cognitive capabilities. It is possible
that both interpretations might be correct and involved in
the pathway toward conventional showing gestures, just at
different moments in development. It is also possible that
different infants may follow different developmental paths.
Under the first interpretation, the behaviours may be
coincidental, exploratory or arousal-based: infants were
simply playing with the object, or got excited by the situation,
and happened to move in a way that resembled a showing ges-
ture. One could thus conclude that these behaviours are
unrelated to showing gestures, or are only related to the
extent that they involve similar motor capacities to those
required in order to produce the conventional behaviour. On
some accounts, it is only after infants have undergone
relevant cognitive developments (such as means-ends under-
standing [2] and understanding of attention and intentions
[30]) that they can start to produce intentionally communica-
tive gestures, suggesting that behaviours that occur prior to
this understanding are not relevant. However, even if these
behaviours are initially non-communicative, it does not pre-
clude them from playing a role in the developmental
pathway towards showing [7,21]. Even unintentional beha-
viours, as long as they are show-like, could elicit a positive
response from caregivers, which in turn would encourage
infants to engage in further instances of these behaviours, pro-
viding a cycle of learning from which infants could gradually
become aware of the effects of these actions [21].
A second way of interpreting incipient showing gestures is
that they are communicative, and that infants intend to draw
the adult’s attention to the object; it is just that they do not
yet do this in a conventional way. In these cases, infants mani-
fest a burgeoning capacity to engage in showing that is limited
because the infants have limited motor control that prevents
them from producing the conventional form and/or they do
not yet fully understand the optimal form of a conventional
show [2]. For example, in support of this interpretation, in
the current study, there were several cases in which the behav-
iour almost met the criteria for a conventional show, but did
not, because the object was not held stably in place, e.g.:
Participant 1, 9 months: The infant raised the object to the side of
her head, making eye contact with E. She brought her arm for-
ward so the object was held briefly (less than 1 second)
towards E’s face, before moving the toy up and down and smil-
ing. Whilst shaking the toy, she attended to it briefly, and twice
the up and down movement was paused so the toy was only
briefly held stable in front of E.
Participant 4, 9 months: After the mother commented on a book
the infant was holding and looking down at, the infant looked up
at the mother, smiled, laughed, and raised the book to his head
height, towards his mother’s face, and lowered it, all in a single
arcing motion. The mother smiled and touched the book,
saying, ‘Want me to do it?’, but the infant continued to hold it.
There are several features of these examples that provide sup-
port for the thesis that these are not simply coincidentally
show-like movements, but rather attempts to bring the object
into the adult’s visual attention communicatively. In each
case, there is visual attention to both the object and the adult,
and a smile produced alongside the action. The motion is
towards the adult’s face, either with a shaking motion or con-
tinuous movement. In the second case, the mother
understood the act as bringing the object into her attention
(though seemingly as a request for help). In each case, it is
plausible that the infants were simply limited by their motor
skills; they attempted to produce an intentional show, but
lacked the coordination or strength to hold the object stably
towards the adult.
Other observations suggest that at least some infants
might gradually incorporate objects into engagements as
they transition from engaging others communicatively in
a dyadic manner, to doing so triadically. Consider the
following example:
Participant 2, 8 months: The infant grasped the object, without
looking at it. He then looked up to his mother, smiled, and
held the object up and out in front of him, at about his head
height. He held the object stable for several seconds as he
rocked his body back and forth, seemingly in excitement. As
he did so, his mother said, ‘What’s that? What’s that?’in a
high-pitched tone. The infant then lowered the object.
In this case, the infant consistently looked at his mother and
smiled at her, without visually attending to the object. This
suggests that he was communicatively engaging with her in
a dyadic manner, rather than drawing her attention to the
object. However, his raising and holding stable of the object
was salient, and otherwise very much resembled a con-
ventional show; it was clearly towards the mother and held
stable for several seconds. It is relevant here that his raising
of the object resulted in an excited response from the
mother—one that likely would not have occurred without
the inclusion of the object in the act. It is possible that this be-
haviour is declarative in the older sense of the word initially
used by Bates and colleagues [31]: the use of an object to
draw attention to oneself (see also [16] for a discussion of
this behaviour). Alternatively, cases such as these may
represent ‘transitional forms’between dyadic and triadic
engagements, in that it is not clear that the infant was draw-
ing the adult’s attention to the object, but the act of raising the
object was salient within the engagement. On this view,
objects are gradually included within the engagement, as
infants become increasingly aware of the role they can play
in interactions, and as caregivers increasingly react to the
inclusion of objects by infants [32,33].
Infants who are motivated to engage another person with
an object may require experience to learn the conventional
positioning of an object when showing it—a position that is
optimal spatially but also, critically, with regard to eliciting
a social response. For example, some infants (e.g. Participant
15, 9 months) held the object away from their body and kept
it stable, with gaze alternation between object and adult, but
not clearly up and towards the adult’s face. However, other
features that have been used to identify intentionally commu-
nicative acts, such as waiting for a response and persisting
with the act when needed [2], were not always present in
these types of examples, so we cannot be sure that they
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4
were intentionally communicative (though note that with
cases such as Participant 2, 8 months, above, neither of these
features was necessary as the mother immediately took the
act to be communicative). It may be that an infant can oftensuc-
ceed in getting another to attend to an object with a suboptimal
(e.g. not clearly directed, unstable, with no response waiting) or
non-conventional show, but it is less clear and thus less likely to
elicit a response than a conventional show [15]. However, it is
worth mentioning that another feature commonly used to
identify communicative behaviours, eye contact, was almost
always observed (with just two exceptions; see electronic sup-
plementary material, section S3), suggesting that in most cases
infants were at least engaging with the adult, and potentially
intentionally communicating.
A final methodological point to highlight is the influence
of the properties of the object. When infants had larger
objects, or objects with protruding or dangling elements, it
was sometimes less clear whether they were showing the
object, for example, when they held a dangling element,
e.g. a leg of a soft toy, with the main body of the object hang-
ing below (e.g. Participant 13, 10 months). Furthermore, the
size and/or weight of the object may have been the source
of some of the problems with stability. A unique challenge
of showing gestures (compared to, for example, pointing) is
that infants actively control the position of the object them-
selves, and thus the objects’size and shape play a role in
the form of the showing gesture that is produced. Any multi-
modal properties the object has can also be relevant; for
example, sometimes infants might share the noise made by
an object, the movements it can make, or its tactile properties.
A possible avenue for future research is to explore infants’
capacity to show these different properties of objects. How-
ever, if the focus of a study is solely on infants’production
of conventional showing gestures, the best objects to use, in
our experience, are small, compact, lightweight, easily
graspable and silent.
To summarize, the majority (72%) of infants produced at
least one incipient showing gesture between 7 and 10 months,
that is, a behavioural sequence that included several com-
ponents of a showing gesture, but lacked a key component.
We have highlighted different plausible ways to interpret
these gestures and have suggested ways in which they
might be implicated in the developmental pathway toward
the emergence of conventional shows. In particular, we
have highlighted the possibility that infants might have
some limited capacity to integrate objects into communicative
exchanges prior to learning to produce conventional showing
gestures, as well as the possibility that they may intend to
show objects, but are limited by their motor capabilities or
not having learnt all the features of a conventional show.
(b) Giving
Figure 2 presents the percentage of infants who received each
score as their highest score for giving gestures at each month.
The first infants to produce a conventional giving gesture
were 9 months old (2 out of 25; 8%). Conventional giving
increased somewhat between 9 and 10 months, with 8 infants
(32%) having produced a conventional give by 10 months.
Focusing on incipient gestures, the first infants (6 out of 25;
24%) to produce incipient gives were 7 months old. Overall,
18 out of 25 (72%) of infants had produced an incipient
giving gesture by 10 months. For individual participants’
scores, see electronic supplementary material, figure S3.
In all cases, the behaviours that were coded as incipient
gives were behaviours that met all but one component of
the criteria for conventional giving gestures. For example,
infants placed the object on E’s hand without releasing it,
or repeatedly tapped it against E’s hand, or released it in
an uncontrolled manner, such that it made contact with E’s
hand but did not remain in E’s hand. Since coordinated
gaze to the adult’s face is a potential indicator of communica-
tive intent, it is worth noting that only 1 out of 25 infants (4%)
produced a conventional giving gesture with a look to E’s
face at 9 months, and 1 out of 25 (4%) did so at 10 months
(a different infant). Further information regarding gaze
coordination with incipient giving gestures can be found in
the electronic supplementary material, section S3. However,
giving gestures are frequently not coordinated with looks to
the adult’s face; gaze is frequently on the target object and/
or the adult’s hand to ensure that the object is successfully
placed onto the adult’s hand [14,15].
As with incipient showing gestures, there are at least two
possible ways to interpret these incipient giving gestures.
First, it is possible that infants did not have any understand-
ing of E’s request and instead were interacting with E’s hand
simply as a salient focal point for exploration. Even if so, in
the context of give-and-take games, these behaviours may
serve as interactional triggers for caregiver responses: as
infants place the object, caregivers may encourage them to
release it or simply take the object [21]. This in turn facilitates
the infants’transition from a passive to an active, initiating
participant [23].
Second, there are alternative plausible explanations that
ascribe varying degrees of social understanding to the infants.
For example, after having participated in previous interactions
with caregivers in which caregivers had taken the objects from
infants themselves [22–24], infants might mistakenly have
believed that E wanted them simply to put the object on his
hand, expecting that he would take it himself once they did
this. We observed that several infants at 9 and 10 months
looked up at E’s face, sometimes with a smile, after initially pla-
cing the object on his hand without releasing it,suggesting that
the placing waswhat they thought they were expected to do. It
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60
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40
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678
age (months)
910
percentage of infants who received each score
score: 0: no give 1: incipient give 2: conventional give
Figure 2. Percentages of infants who received scores of ‘0’,‘1’and ‘2’as their
highest score for giving gestures at each month.
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5
might thus be the case that at least some infants engage in
‘allowing-to-take’before actual giving.
In other cases, it seemed clear that infants were actually
trying to give the object, but did not succeed because of var-
ious limitations—most commonly motor limitations that
prevented them from releasing the object in a controlled
manner once it was placed on E’s hand. For example:
Participant 14, 9 months: E requested the object. The infant, look-
ing at E’s hand, lowered the object onto it, holding it there for a
few seconds. He smiled broadly, making eye contact with E. He
then released all his fingers from the object, and it fell off E’s
hand and onto the table. E repeated the request twice more,
and at the third request, the infant again placed the object onto
E’s hand. This time, he closed all his fingers and squeezed the
object, which caused it to fall out of his hand, bounce off E’s
hand, and fall onto the table.
That the infant placed the object onto E’s hand and released
his fingers from the object plausibly indicates some intention
to give the object to E. Other possibilities for limitations are
that infants may have struggled to inhibit maintaining pos-
session of the object, or may have failed to understand that
giving requires one not just to release the object but also to
leave the object in the other’s hand. For example, one partici-
pant (Participant 10, 10 months), having seemingly struggled
for several seconds to release the object onto E’s hand (includ-
ing removing his fingers from the object and sliding his hand
off the object), retrieved the object immediately after releasing
it onto E’s hand.
These observations again suggest the possibility that
these gestures, and the social understanding underlying
them, emerge in a gradual manner, rather than in an all-or-
nothing switch from no capacity or understanding to a
mature capacity and understanding. Further observations
provide evidence that infants may have had an understand-
ing of E’s request, and object transfer in general, before
they produced conventional giving gestures. For example,
some infants dropped the object in front of them and
looked up at E (e.g. Participant 5, 9 months), or threw it
towards E or E’s hand after making eye contact with him
(e.g. Participant 2, 9 months), which again may have been
with the expectation that E obtain the object. In one case (Par-
ticipant 24, 10 months), the infant grasped E’s hand and
moved it towards the object, which was on the table. This
is potentially a ‘hand-taking gesture’[26], encouraging E to
take the object himself, and in that case, the infant ultimately
did give E the object conventionally by the end of the task.
The reverse also occurred: an infant (Participant 3, 9
months) grabbed E’s hand and moved it away from the
object, which may have been evidence that she understood
but rejected his request.
To summarize, the majority (72%) of infants produced at
least one incipient giving gesture between 7 and 10 months,
that is, a behavioural sequence that included several com-
ponents of a giving gesture, but lacked a key component. We
have highlighted different plausible ways to interpret these
gestures. While some of these actions may have been just
exploratory, in other cases, it appeared that infants had some
understanding of E’s request, and object transfer more gener-
ally, before they produced conventional giving gestures.
(c) Maternal interview responses
Mothers, too, reported incipient gestures. For example, in
response to E’s question about whether infants produced
showing gestures, there were reports of the object not being
held stable (examples are edited slightly for clarity):
Participant 7, 9 months: ‘…the occasional sort of flail that looks
slightly deliberate, or more like a pause in play, and also getting
eye contact’.
Participant 16, 8 months: ‘I suppose sometimes when he’s bang-
ing the blocks he’ll stop and he’ll kind of go like this [raises a fist
and shakes it] with his hand towards you. But I don’t know if he is
or not’.
And non-conventional shows:
Participant 5, 10 months: ‘He’ll sometimes throw it. I feel like he
throws it at me’.
Participant 6, 9 months: ‘Just holds it right up to your face’.
Participant 11, 10 months: ‘Yeah…basically she’d just bring me
something, like a ‘cool’Kleenex, she’ll just put it on your lap’.
Similarly, for giving there were reports of it not being
controlled:
Participant 7, 10 months: ’…occasionally I can get her to give me
the spoon. Mostly, she drops it, but sometimes she’ll actually put
it in my hand’.
Participant 13, 9 months: ‘No I don’t think so, no. I think she
maybe tries to. But, I don’t think it has been that controlled
just yet’.
And reports of non-conventional gives
Participant 15, 10 months: ‘…giving somebody something else he
hasn’t quite mastered, but he’ll kind of drop something; he’ll
have it, and then will drop it and look at you, and that’s
almost his way of saying “Hey look!”’
In the cases of non-conventional gestures, it appears that
mothers often viewed these as de facto instances of showing
or giving, despite them being non-conventional. This suggests
that mothers may respond not only to the form of the gesture,
but also when they believe the infant is demonstrating the
intention to show or give an object. This intention may be
inferred through infants’use of gaze alternation, and the con-
text, and also when the relevant interactional outcome (e.g.
object transfer) is achieved, regardless of the gesture’s conven-
tionality. Conventionality may then result at least in part from
mothers’increasing standards regarding what they respond to
[34], combined with the infant interacting with members of
the wider community, who would be more likely to understand
and respond to conventional rather than idiosyncratic gestural
forms.
A further noteworthy feature of the mothers’comments is
that there was often ambiguity between showing and giving,
though this was less common in later assessments (i.e. at 11
and 12 months of age). Previous work has highlighted that
whether an infant’s initial act of holding out an object
resolves as a show or a give is often an outcome of a dynami-
cally unfolding social situation [14]. Both caregivers [15,35]
and researchers can find it difficult to tell whether infants
intend to show or give an object. Often, mothers responded
to the interview questions about showing with a response
that involved the infant transferring the object to the
mother (e.g. Participant 11, 10 months above). In other
cases, mothers explicitly reflected on the difficulty in inter-
preting the infant’s potential showing or giving behaviour.
For example, in response to a question about showing,
some mothers said:
Participant 18, 8 months: ‘I think he is. He starts doing the bash-
ing that he does with everything some days, but then he’ll sort of
catch your eye and hold things. He seems to be holding things up
royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rstb Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 377: 20210102
6
and he knows that if he holds certain toys like that I’ll take them
from him and join in and play with him. So he certainly seems to,
whether or not he’s meaning to’.
Participant 21, 10 months: ‘With showing…I actually grab it
[mimes grabbing] [saying,] ‘Oh, thank you!’I’m not sure if she
actually wants me to take it, but she does hold it towards me.
Not always, though’.
These examples suggest that at these ages, sometimes the
specific functional outcome is less important than the engage-
ment with the mother. It has been suggested that infants at
this age may have no social intentions and are simply carried
along by the responses of the caregiver (e.g. [15]). However, it
may also be the case that infants are simply open to whatever
way the interaction unfolds, and only later become more par-
ticular about their specific intention being understood,
perhaps because they better understand the consequences
of different functional outcomes [21].
4. Conclusion
This study has sought to provide new insights into the beha-
viours that precede the emergence of some of the earliest
gestures human infants produce: showing and giving. It
has documented and described incipient gestures; behaviours
that involve components of a conventional gesture but that
are missing key components. Exploring a range of examples
from observations and maternal reports, a case was made
for why these various behaviours should be considered rel-
evant steps along the developmental pathway to
conventional forms of showing and giving. Behavioural fea-
tures have been identified that indicate that young infants
(as young as 7 months) may have some burgeoning capacity
to engage in showing or giving, or at least intend to show or
give objects, even if they are not yet capable of conventional
showing and giving. On this view, conventional showing and
giving are a product of a series of gradual cognitive and
motoric developments that take place in the context of
repeated social engagements.
Future work can explore what capacity and understand-
ing infants might possess at different stages of gesture
development, and, as some researchers have already begun
to do with the development of giving [19,21–25], can also
more closely examine changes at the level of the caregiver–
infant dyad. By examining the capacities of infants (at the
level of the infant), as well as developments in patterns of
shared activity at the level of the dyad, it will be possible to
articulate the key cognitive, motor and interactive processes
that contribute to the emergence of infants’earliest gestures.
As a methodological note, it may also be beneficial to provide
a more extensive period of free play, or conduct the free play
in a more natural context (e.g. the infants’homes), to increase
the likelihood of observing spontaneous gestures [18].
Additionally, greater attention could be paid to potential
differences between infants’behaviour in free play inter-
actions with caregivers versus elicitation procedures.
Finally, future work can assess caregiver understanding of
incipient gestures by exploring in depth how caregivers
respond to possible or partial gestures by infants in live
interactions. We have suggested that incipient gestures may
serve as interactive ‘triggers’for caregiver responses, and
examining caregivers’verbal and behavioural responses to
incipient gestures will provide further evidence about
whether and, if so, how caregivers respond to incipient ges-
tures, and the role these responses may play in the origins
of showing and giving. Caregivers could also be asked expli-
citly about their understanding of incipient gestures in an
interview context, in order to focus more directly on their jus-
tifications for interpreting incipient or non-conventional
behaviours as de facto instances of showing or giving.
More generally, this study has not only joined other recent
work in calling for greater attention to be paid to infants’
showing and giving gestures [14–18], but has also stressed
the importance of understanding the developmental pathway
that leads to the emergence of conventional showing, giving
and other gestures. Pursuing this question further will help
contribute to an understanding of humans’early capacity
and motivation for social interaction, as well as the core
role played by gestures [36]. This in turn can help address
the question of precisely what are the cognitive, behavioural
and motivational elements that constitute the human ‘inter-
action engine’[1].
Ethics. The research was granted ethical approval by the ethics com-
mittee of the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the
University of St Andrews (approval code: PS13951). The research
was conducted according to the principles expressed in the Declara-
tion of Helsinki. Informed consent was obtained from all mothers
who participated.
Data accessibility. The data are provided in the electronic supplementary
material [37].
Authors’contributions. G.S.: conceptualization, data curation, formal
analysis, funding acquisition, investigation, methodology, project
administration, resources, software, visualization, writing—original
draft and writing—review and editing; M.C.: conceptualization,
methodology, resources, supervision and writing—review and
editing.
Both authors gave final approval for publication and agreed to be
held accountable for the work performed therein.
Conflict of interest declaration. We declare we have no competing interests.
Funding. This study was supported by the University of St Andrews
(PhD Scholarship).
Acknowledgements. Many thanks to the mothers and infants who took
part in the study. Thanks also to Beatrice Bowlby, Kolja Rath and
Grace Upham for help with reliability coding, as well as to those
who helped with parts of the data collection and interview transcrip-
tion process. We also thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers
for helpful comments.
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