Search results for "Prelinguistic Infants’ Gestures"

Is displacement possible without language? Evidence from preverbal infants and chimpanzees

2013

Is displacement possible without language? This question was addressed in a recent work by Liszkowski and colleagues (Liszkowski, Schafer, Carpenter, & Tomasello, 2009). The authors carried out an experiment to demonstrate that 12-month-old prelinguistic infants can communicate about absent entities by using pointing gestures, while chimpanzees cannot. The main hypothesis of their study is that displacement does not depend on language but is, however, exclusively human and instead depends on species-specific social-cognitive human skills. Against this hypothesis, we will argue that a symbolic representation is needed to intentionally communicate absence and that this symbolic representa…