Susan Goldin-Meadow
Biographic Data
| ID | 742767 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susan Goldin-Meadow |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susan |
| FAMILY NAME | Goldin-Meadow |
| SIGNATURE | GOLDIN-MEADOW S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8536-2673 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 97 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 196 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 96 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1982 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Adults' number gestures focus children on numeracy
Iconic number gestures: Naturalistic use by children and parents in the early home environment
A growing body of research suggests that children's use and understanding of cardinal number gestures (e.g., raising two fingers to indicate "two") reflect greater cardinal number knowledge than their number words alone (e.g., Butts, 2025; Gibson et al., 2019, 2022; Gunderson et al., 2015; Orrantia et al., 2024; Oswald et al., 2025). The present study adds to these findings by examining how often, and in what contexts, parents and their young chi…
Signers and Speakers Show Distinct Temporal Kinematic Signatures in Their Manual Communicative Movements
Using our hands to move a stick along a path differs in systematic ways from using our hands to communicate about moving the stick. Kinematic signatures (e.g., enlarged moving trajectories) have been found to mark a movement as communicative, relative to its non-communicative counterpart. But communicative movements are frequently embedded within an expressive system and might differ as a function of that system. For example, deaf signers move th…
Deaf homesigners can create the foundations of phonetics and phonology without an adult linguistic model
Children who are exposed to minimal linguistic input can nevertheless introduce linguistic features into their communication systems at the level of morphology, syntax, and semantics (Goldin-Meadow, 2003a). However, it is not clear whether they can do so at the level of phonetics and phonology. This study asks whether congenitally deaf children, unable to learn spoken language and living in a hearing family without exposure to sign language, intr…
What can language creation tell us about language evolution
How did the languages we use today come about? One way to make this problem more tractable is to think about language, not as a single entity but as a compilation of properties. Biological evolution may have resulted in the creation of some properties of language. However, cultural evolution, which relies on changes introduced by successive generations of users and is quicker than biological evolution, may also be responsible for the introduction…
Playing With Language in the Manual Modality: Which Motions Do Signers Gradiently Modify
Language is traditionally characterized as an arbitrary, symbolic system, made up of discrete, categorical forms. But iconicity and gradience are pervasive in communication. For example, in spoken languages, word forms can be “played with” in iconic gradient ways by varying vowel length, pitch, or speed (e.g., “It's been a loooooooong day”). However, little is known about this process in sign languages. Here, we (1) explore gradient modification …
Does gesture follow speech in describing metaphorical motion events over developmental time
The organization of verb meaning in Lengua de Señas Nicaragüense (LSN): Sequential or simultaneous structures
One structural dimension that varies across languages is the simultaneous or sequential expression of meaning. Complex predicates can layer meanings together simultaneously in a single-verb predicate (SVP) or distribute them sequentially in a multiple-verb predicate (MVP). We ask whether typological variability in this dimension might be a consequence of systematic patterns of diachronic change. We examine the distribution of markers of agency an…
What the development of gesture with and without speech can tell us about the effect of language on thought
Adults display cross-linguistic variability in their speech in how they package and order semantic elements of a motion event. These differences can also be found in speakers’ co-speech gestures (gesturing with speech), but not in their silent gestures (gesturing without speech). Here, we examine when in development children show the differences between co-speech gesture and silent gesture found in adults. We studied speech and gestures produced …
Gesturing during disfluent speech: A pragmatic account
Comparing apples to manzanas and oranges to naranjas: A new measure of English‐Spanish vocabulary for dual language learners
The valid assessment of vocabulary development in dual‐language‐learning infants is critical to developmental science. We developed the Dual Language Learners English‐Spanish (DLL‐ES) Inventories to measure vocabularies of U.S. English‐Spanish DLLs. The inventories provide translation equivalents for all Spanish and English items on Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) short forms; extended inventories based on CDI long forms; and Spanish la…
Children’s Early Spontaneous Comparisons Predict Later Analogical Reasoning Skills: An Investigation of Parental Influence
Laboratory studies have demonstrated beneficial effects of making comparisons on children’s analogical reasoning skills. We extend this finding to an observational dataset comprising 42 children. The prevalence of specific comparisons, which identify a feature of similarity or difference, in children’s spontaneous speech from 14–58 months is associated with higher scores in tests of verbal and non-verbal analogy in 6th grade. We test two pre-regi…
It's not just what we don't know: The mapping problem in the acquisition of negation
Emergent Morphology in Child Homesign: Evidence from Number Language
Human languages, signed and spoken, can be characterized by the structural patterns they use to associate communicative forms with meanings. One such pattern is paradigmatic morphology, where complex words are built from the systematic use and re-use of sub-lexical units. Here, we provide evidence of emergent paradigmatic morphology akin to number inflection in a communication system developed without input from a conventional language, homesign.…
Lila R. Gleitman
Lila R. Gleitman John A. Goldsmith and Susan Goldin-Meadow Lila R. Gleitman, president of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) in 1993, passed away on August 8, 2021, at the end of an inspired and inspiring life in which she mentored generations of students of linguistics and psychology and left an indelible mark on how we think about the acquisition of language. She began her academic career at Swarthmore College in 1969 and spent many years …
The Seeds of the Noun-Verb Distinction in the Manual Modality: Improvisation and Interaction in the Emergence of Grammatical Categories
The noun-verb distinction has long been considered a fundamental property of human language, and has been found in some form even in the earliest stages of language emergence, including homesign and the early generations of emerging sign languages. We present two experimental studies that use silent gesture to investigate how noun-verb distinctions develop in the manual modality through two key processes: (i) improvising using novel signals by in…
How Pointing is Integrated into Language: Evidence From Speakers and Signers
When people speak or sign, they not only describe using words but also depict and indicate. How are these different methods of communication integrated? Here, we focus on pointing and, in particular, on commonalities and differences in how pointing is integrated into language by speakers and signers. One aspect of this integration is semantic —how pointing is integrated with the meaning conveyed by the surrounding language. Another aspect is stru…
Children integrate speech and gesture across a wider temporal window than speech and action when learning a math concept
Sign language, like spoken language, promotes object categorization in young hearing infants
Structural biases that children bring to language learning: A cross-cultural look at gestural input to homesign
The Predictive Value of Non-Referential Beat Gestures: Early Use in Parent–Child Interactions Predicts Narrative Abilities at 5 Years of Age
A longitudinal study with 45 children (Hispanic, 13%; non-Hispanic, 87%) investigated whether the early production of non-referential beat and flip gestures, as opposed to referential iconic gestures, in parent–child naturalistic interactions from 14 to 58 months old predicts narrative abilities at age 5. Results revealed that only non-referential beats significantly (p < .01) predicted later narrative productions. The pragmatic functions of the …
Crosslinguistic similarity and variation in the simultaneous morphology of sign languages
Two differences between signed and spoken languages that have been widely discussed in the literature are: the degree to which morphology is expressed simultaneously (rather than sequentially), and the degree to which iconicity is used, particularly in predicates of motion and location, often referred to as classifier predicates. In this paper we analyze a set of properties marking agency and number in four sign languages for their crosslinguisti…
Unpacking the Gestures of Chemistry Learners: What the Hands Tell Us About Correct and Incorrect Conceptions of Stereochemistry
In this study, adults, who were naïve to organic chemistry, drew stereoisomers of molecules and explained their drawings. From these explanations, we identified nine strategies that participants expressed during those explanations. Five of the nine strategies referred to properties of the molecule that were explanatorily irrelevant to solving the problem; the remaining four referred to properties that were explanatorily relevant to the solution. …
Personal narrative as a “breeding ground” for higher-order thinking talk in early parent–child interactions
Personal narrative is decontextualized talk where individuals recount stories of personal experiences about past or future events. As an everyday discursive speech type, narrative potentially invites parents and children to explicitly link together, generalize from, and make inferences about representations-i.e., to engage in higher-order thinking talk (HOTT). Here we ask whether narratives in early parent-child interactions include proportionall…
The origins of higher-order thinking lie in children's spontaneous talk across the pre-school years
From children's hands to adults' ears: Gesture's role in the learning process
Children can express thoughts in gesture that they do not express in speech--they produce gesture-speech mismatches. Moreover, children who produce mismatches on a given task are particularly ready to learn that task. Gesture, then, is a tool that researchers can use to predict who will profit from instruction. But is gesture also useful to adults who must decide how to instruct a particular child? We asked 8 adults to instruct 38 third- and four…
Parent praise to toddlers predicts fourth grade academic achievement via children’s incremental mindsets
In a previous study, parent-child praise was observed in natural interactions at home when children were 1, 2, and 3 years of age. Children who received a relatively high proportion of process praise (e.g., praise for effort and strategies) showed stronger incremental motivational frameworks, including a belief that intelligence can be developed and a greater desire for challenge, when they were in 2nd or 3rd grade (Gunderson et al., 2013). The c…
Hands in the air: Using ungrounded iconic gestures to teach children conservation of quantity
Including gesture in instruction facilitates learning. Why? One possibility is that gesture points out objects in the immediate context and thus helps ground the words learners hear in the world they see. Previous work on gesture's role in instruction has used gestures that either point to or trace paths on objects, thus providing support for this hypothesis. The experiments described here investigated the possibility that gesture helps children …
New evidence about language and cognitive development based on a longitudinal study: Hypotheses for intervention
We review findings from a four-year longitudinal study of language learning conducted on two samples: a sample of typically developing children whose parents vary substantially in socioeconomic status, and a sample of children with pre- or perinatal brain injury. This design enables us to study language development across a wide range of language learning environments and a wide range of language learners. We videotaped samples of children's and …
The importance of gesture in children's spatial reasoning
On average, men outperform women on mental rotation tasks. Even boys as young as 4 1/2 perform better than girls on simplified spatial transformation tasks. The goal of our study was to explore ways of improving 5-year-olds' performance on a spatial transformation task and to examine the strategies children use to solve this task. We found that boys performed better than girls before training and that both boys and girls improved with training, w…
Once Is Not Enough: Standards of Well-Formedness in Manual Communication Created over Three Different Timespans
Natural languages are characterized by standards of well-formedness. These internal standards are likely to be, at least in part, a product of a consensus achieved among the users of a language over time. Nevertheless, it is possible that an individual, attempting to invent symbols to communicate de novo, might generate a system of symbols that is similarly characterized by internal standards of well-formedness. In these studies, we explore this …
Beyond the Input Given: The Child's Role in the Acquisition of Language
The child's creative contribution to the language-acquisition process is potentially most apparent in situations where the linguistic input available to the child is degraded, providing the child with ample opportunity to elaborate upon that input. The children described in this paper are deaf, with hearing losses so severe that they cannot naturally acquire spoken language, and their hearing parents have chosen not to expose them to sign languag…
Vocabulary, syntax, and narrative development in typically developing children and children with early unilateral brain injury: Early parental talk about the “there-and-then” matters
This study examines the role of a particular kind of linguistic input--talk about the past and future, pretend, and explanations, that is, talk that is decontextualized--in the development of vocabulary, syntax, and narrative skill in typically developing (TD) children and children with pre- or perinatal brain injury (BI). Decontextualized talk has been shown to be particularly effective in predicting children's language skills, but it is not cle…
Language Emergence
Language emergence describes moments in historical time when nonlinguistic systems become linguistic. Because language can be invented de novo in the manual modality, this offers insight into the emergence of language in ways that the oral modality cannot. Here we focus on homesign, gestures developed by deaf individuals who cannot acquire spoken language and have not been exposed to sign language. We contrast homesign with (a) gestures that hear…
When does a system become phonological? Handshape production in gesturers, signers, and homesigners
Language intervention research in early childhood care and education: A systematic survey of the literature
Pointing and naming are not redundant: Children use gesture to modify nouns before they modify nouns in speech
Nouns form the first building blocks of children's language but are not consistently modified by other words until around 2.5 years of age. Before then, children often combine their nouns with gestures that indicate the object labeled by the noun, for example, pointing at a bottle while saying "bottle." These gestures are typically assumed to be redundant with speech. Here we present data challenging this assumption, suggesting that these early p…
Gesture's Role in the Learning Process
When children explain their answers to a problem, they convey their thoughts not only in speech but also in the gestures that accompany that speech. Teachers, when explaining problems to a child, also convey information in both speech and gesture. Thus, there is an undercurrent of conversation that takes place in gesture alongside the acknowledged conversation in speech. This article shows that these gestures can play a crucial, although typicall…
Hierarchical structure in a self-created communication system: Building nominal constituents in homesign
Deaf children whose hearing losses are so severe that they cannot acquire spoken language and whose hearing parents have not exposed them to sign language nevertheless use gestures, called homesigns , to communicate. Homesigners have been shown to refer to entities by pointing at that entity (a demonstrative, that). They also use iconic gestures and category points that refer, not to a particular entity, but to its class (a noun, bird ). We used …
What's communication got to do with it? Gesture in children blind from birth
It is widely accepted that gesture can serve a communicative function. The purpose of this study was to explore gesture use in congenitally blind individuals who have never seen gesture and have no experience with its communicative function. Four children blind from birth were tested in 3 discourse situations (narrative, reasoning, and spatial directions) and compared with groups of sighted and blindfolded sighted children. Blind children produce…
Narrative processing in typically developing children and children with early unilateral brain injury: Seeing gesture matters
Narrative skill in kindergarteners has been shown to be a reliable predictor of later reading comprehension and school achievement. However, we know little about how to scaffold children's narrative skill. Here we examine whether the quality of kindergarten children's narrative retellings depends on the kind of narrative elicitation they are given. We asked this question with respect to typically developing (TD) kindergarten children and children…
Gesture for Linguists: A Handy Primer
Humans communicate using language, but they also communicate usinggesture- spontaneous movements of the hands and body that universally accompany speech. Gestures can be distinguished from other movements, segmented, and assigned meaning based on their forms and functions. Moreover, gestures systematically integrate with language at all levels of linguistic structure, as evidenced in both production and perception. Viewed typologically, gesture i…
When Do Speakers Use Gestures to Specify Who Does What to Whom? The Role of Language Proficiency and Type of Gestures in Narratives
The noun-verb distinction in established and emergent sign systems
In a number of signed languages, the distinction between nouns and verbs is evident in the morphophonology of the signs themselves. Here we use a novel elicitation paradigm to investigate the systematicity, emergence, and development of the noun-verb distinction (qua objects vs. actions) in an established sign language, American Sign Language (ASL), an emerging sign language, Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), and in the precursor to NSL, Nicaraguan…
Does linguistic input play the same role in language learning for children with and without early brain injury
Children with unilateral pre- or perinatal brain injury (BI) show remarkable plasticity for language learning. Previous work highlights the important role that lesion characteristics play in explaining individual variation in plasticity in the language development of children with BI. The current study examines whether the linguistic input that children with BI receive from their caregivers also contributes to this early plasticity, and whether l…
Breaking down gesture and action in mental rotation: Understanding the components of movement that promote learning
Past research has shown that children's mental rotation skills are malleable and can be improved through action experience-physically rotating objects-or gesture experience-showing how objects could rotate (e.g., Frick, Ferrara, & Newcombe, 2013; Goldin-Meadow et al., 2012; Levine, Goldin-Meadow, Carlson, & Hemani-Lopez, 2018). These two types of movements both involve rotation, but differ on a number of components. Here, we break down action and…
How handshape type can distinguish between nouns and verbs in homesign
All established languages, spoken or signed, make a distinction between nouns and verbs. Even a young sign language emerging within a family of deaf individuals has been found to mark the noun-verb distinction, and to use handshape type to do so. Here we ask whether handshape type is used to mark the noun-verb distinction in a gesture system invented by a deaf child who does not have access to a usable model of either spoken or signed language. T…
Playing With Language in the Manual Modality: Which Motions Do Signers Gradiently Modify
Language is traditionally characterized as an arbitrary, symbolic system, made up of discrete, categorical forms. But iconicity and gradience are pervasive in communication. For example, in spoken languages, word forms can be “played with” in iconic gradient ways by varying vowel length, pitch, or speed (e.g., “It's been a loooooooong day”). However, little is known about this process in sign languages. Here, we (1) explore gradient modification …
Unpacking the Gestures of Chemistry Learners: What the Hands Tell Us About Correct and Incorrect Conceptions of Stereochemistry
In this study, adults, who were naïve to organic chemistry, drew stereoisomers of molecules and explained their drawings. From these explanations, we identified nine strategies that participants expressed during those explanations. Five of the nine strategies referred to properties of the molecule that were explanatorily irrelevant to solving the problem; the remaining four referred to properties that were explanatorily relevant to the solution. …
Actions speak louder than gestures when you are 2 years old
Interpreting iconic gestures can be challenging for children. Here, we explore the features and functions of iconic gestures that make them more challenging for young children to interpret than instrumental actions. In Study 1, we show that 2.5-year-olds are able to glean size information from handshape in a simple gesture, although their performance is significantly worse than 4-year-olds'. Studies 2 to 4 explore the boundary conditions of 2.5-y…
Experimental evidence for agent–patient categories in child language
Evidence provided by contrastive word order for agent and patient semantic categories in young children's spontaneous speech is confounded. Agents (effectors of the action) tend to be animate; patients (entities acted upon) tend to be inanimate. In an experiment designed to circumvent this confounding and to test young children's linguistic sensitivity to the role an entity plays in the action, nine children (2; 4·0–2; 11·5) described actions inv…
The mismatch between gesture and speech as an index of transitional knowledge
Symbolic development in deaf children
An examination of research indicates that deafness in and of itself does not preclude the development of symbols in children
Language Development in Exceptional Circumstances
The role of parental input in the development of a morphological system
In order to isolate the properties of language whose development can withstand wide variations in learning conditions, we have observed children who have not had access to any conventional linguistic input but who have otherwise experienced normal social environments. The children we study are deaf with hearing losses so severe that they cannot naturally acquire spoken language, and whose hearing parents have chosen not to expose them to a sign l…
Beyond the Input Given: The Child's Role in the Acquisition of Language
The child's creative contribution to the language-acquisition process is potentially most apparent in situations where the linguistic input available to the child is degraded, providing the child with ample opportunity to elaborate upon that input. The children described in this paper are deaf, with hearing losses so severe that they cannot naturally acquire spoken language, and their hearing parents have chosen not to expose them to sign languag…
Comprehension and production of gesture in combination with speech in one-word speakers
This study explores the role that gesture plays in the earliest stages of language learning. We describe how one-word speakers use gesture in combination with speech in their spontaneous communications, and interpret gesture presented in combination with speech in an experimental situation. Forty one-word speakers (ages 1;2.22 to 2;4.6) were videotaped in a free-play session which provided data on the child's spontaneous gesture and speech produc…
Once Is Not Enough: Standards of Well-Formedness in Manual Communication Created over Three Different Timespans
Natural languages are characterized by standards of well-formedness. These internal standards are likely to be, at least in part, a product of a consensus achieved among the users of a language over time. Nevertheless, it is possible that an individual, attempting to invent symbols to communicate de novo, might generate a system of symbols that is similarly characterized by internal standards of well-formedness. In these studies, we explore this …
Kanzi: The ape at the brink of the human mind
What's communication got to do with it? Gesture in children blind from birth
It is widely accepted that gesture can serve a communicative function. The purpose of this study was to explore gesture use in congenitally blind individuals who have never seen gesture and have no experience with its communicative function. Four children blind from birth were tested in 3 discourse situations (narrative, reasoning, and spatial directions) and compared with groups of sighted and blindfolded sighted children. Blind children produce…
The development of gesture and speech as an integrated system: D Evelopment of G Esture and S Peech as an I Ntegrated S Ystem
Children, even at the one-word stage of language development, spontaneously produce gestures along with their speech, just as adults do. Although there appears to be a brief period prior to the onset of two-word speech during which gesture and speech do not form a well-integrated system, the ability to coordinate gesture and speech to convey a single message--and to "read" others' gestures with their speech to comprehend a message--develops early…
The role of gesture in communication and thinking
Explaining Math: Gesturing Lightens the Load
Why is it that people cannot keep their hands still when they talk? One reason may be that gesturing actually lightens cognitive load while a person is thinking of what to say. We asked adults and children to remember a list of letters or words while explaining how they solved a math problem. Both groups remembered significantly more items when they gestured during their math explanations than when they did not gesture. Gesturing appeared to save…
Contents Vol. 44, 2001
Enacting Stories, Seeing Worlds: Similarities and Differences in the Cross-Cultural Narrative Development of Linguistically Isolated Deaf Children
The stories that children hear not only offer them a model for how to tell stories, but they also serve as a window into their cultural worlds. What would happen if a child were unable to hear what surrounds them? Would such children have any sense that events can be narrated and, if so, would they narrate those events in a culturally appropriate manner? To explore this question, we examined children who did not have access to conventional langua…
Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought
The idea that the language we speak influences the way we think has evoked perennial fascination and intense controversy. According to the strong version of this hypothesis, called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after the American linguists who propounded it, languages vary in their semantic partitioning of the world, and the structure of one's language influences how one understands the world. Thus speakers of different languages perceive the world …
From children's hands to adults' ears: Gesture's role in the learning process
Children can express thoughts in gesture that they do not express in speech--they produce gesture-speech mismatches. Moreover, children who produce mismatches on a given task are particularly ready to learn that task. Gesture, then, is a tool that researchers can use to predict who will profit from instruction. But is gesture also useful to adults who must decide how to instruct a particular child? We asked 8 adults to instruct 38 third- and four…
Gesture's Role in the Learning Process
When children explain their answers to a problem, they convey their thoughts not only in speech but also in the gestures that accompany that speech. Teachers, when explaining problems to a child, also convey information in both speech and gesture. Thus, there is an undercurrent of conversation that takes place in gesture alongside the acknowledged conversation in speech. This article shows that these gestures can play a crucial, although typicall…
Gesture Paves the Way for Language Development
In development, children often use gesture to communicate before they use words. The question is whether these gestures merely precede language development or are fundamentally tied to it. We examined 10 children making the transition from single words to two-word combinations and found that gesture had a tight relation to the children's lexical and syntactic development. First, a great many of the lexical items that each child produced initially…
Gesture is at the cutting edge of early language development
The two faces of gesture: Language and thought
Gesture is typically produced with speech, forming a fully integrated system with that speech. However, under unusual circumstances, gesture can be produced completely on its own — without speech. In these instances, gesture takes over the full burden of communication usually shared by the two modalities. What happens to gesture in these two very different contexts? One possibility is that there are no differences in the forms gesture takes in th…
Do parents lead their children by the hand
The types of gesture+speech combinations children produce during the early stages of language development change over time. This change, in turn, predicts the onset of two-word speech and thus might reflect a cognitive transition that the child is undergoing. An alternative, however, is that the change merely reflects changes in the types of gesture+speech combinations that their caregivers produce. To explore this possibility, we videotaped 40 A…
What language creation in the manual modality tells us about the foundations of language
Universal Grammar offers a set of hypotheses about the biases children bring to language-learning. But testing these hypotheses is difficult, particularly if we look only at language-learning under typical circumstances. Children are influenced by the linguistic input to which they are exposed at the earliest stages of language-learning. Their biases will therefore be obscured by the input they receive. A clearer view of the child’s preparation f…
The two faces of gesture: Language and thought
Gesture is typically produced with speech, forming a fully integrated system with that speech. However, under unusual circumstances, gesture can be produced completely on its own — without speech. In these instances, gesture takes over the full burden of communication usually shared by the two modalities. What happens to gesture in these two very different contexts? One possibility is that there are no differences in the forms gesture takes in th…
When Gesture Is and Is Not Language
Psychology (82 works) · Linguistics (69 works) · Hearing Impairment and Communication (64 works) · Gesture (53 works) · Computer Science (49 works) · Developmental psychology (39 works) · Communication (36 works) · Cognitive psychology (35 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (34 works) · Hand Gesture Recognition Systems (25 works)