Parents who point and use other gestures with their toddlers can give them a head start with learning language, scientists have discovered.

New research in the United States has revealed that young children who pick up gestures from their parents at 14 months have larger and more complex vocabularies when they start school.

As well-educated parents from higher income brackets use more gestures with their babies, the findings help to explain why children from these families develop speech more quickly than those born into lower socio-economic groups.

The gesture effect may also have a lasting influence on children’s intellectual development, because a child’s vocabularly at the start of school is a strong predictor of later academic success.

Meredith Rowe, of the University of Chicago, who conducted the research with her colleague Susan Goldin-Meadow, said the results suggested that parents should be encouraged to point and use their hands when interacting with their children.

“If there is any way to encourage children to gesture to things more before they can speak, that could be useful,” she said. “Talk to your children more, gesture more.” Details of the research were presented yesterday at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Chicago, and are published in the journal Science.

While it was already known that children whose parents talk to them more as toddlers develop language more quickly, the new research is the first to suggest that parental gestures are also important.

The reason may be that by learning to point at things, children become better at connecting words to objects. “Child gesture could play an indirect role in word learning by eliciting timely speech from parents,” the scientists wrote in their paper. “For example, in response to her child’s point at the doll, mother might say, ’yes, that’s a doll,’ thus providing a word for the object that is the focus of the child’s attention.” In the study, the Chicago team videotaped 50 families from different socio-economic groups for 90-minute sessions, all of whom had a toddler aged 14 months. They recorded details of how often both children and their parents spoke and used gestures.

Children from higher income families used gestures to convey an average of 24 different meanings over 90 minutes, while those from less privileged socio-economic groups conveyed only 13 meanings. This was attributable to greater parental use of gesture.

All the children were then assessed again at the age of four and a half (54 months), when they were starting school.The children who had gestured more at the age of 14 months had significantly bigger vocabularies.

Differences between children’s gestures were obvious at 14 months, even though children at that age showed no clear differences in vocabulary or speech.

“At 14 months of age, children are in the very early stages of productive language, they are saying very few words,” Dr Rowe said. “We didn’t see any differences in their spoken language but we did see difference in their gestures.

“It is striking that, in the initial stages of language learning when social economic status differences in children’s spoken vocabulary are not yet evident, we see social economic status differences in child gesture use.

“Children typically do not begin gesturing until around 10 months. Thus, social economic status differences are evident a mere four months, and possibly even sooner, after the onset of child gesture production.” Dr Goldin-Meadow said the gesture effect could have a long-lasting effect on children’s development. “Vocabulary is a key predictor of school success and is a primary reason why children from low-income families enter school at a greater risk of failure than their peers from advantaged families,” she said.

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