the role of declarative pointing in developing a theory of ... · camaioni (1993) argued that one...

The Role of Declarative Pointingin Developing a Theory of Mind

Luigia CamaioniDepartment of Developmental and Social Psychology

University of Rome “La Sapienza”Rome, Italy

Paola PerucchiniDepartment of Educational Science

University of Rome “Roma Tre”Rome, Italy

Francesca Bellagamba and Cristina ColonnesiDepartment of Developmental and Social Psychology

University of Rome “La Sapienza”Rome, Italy

It has been suggested that the child’s capacity to represent and influence another per-son’s attentional state about an object or event in triadic interactions (declarative com-munication) is an early manifestation of social understanding in the second year of life.This study tested the following predictions: First, in typically developing children de-clarative pointing emerges later than imperative pointing. Second, the capacity to usedeclarative pointing is linked to the understanding of other’s intentions (i.e., to the ca-pacity to reproduce other’s intended acts after seeing failed attempts to perform theseacts). The study was conducted in 2 phases. In the first phase, the parents of 133 typi-cally developing infants completed the Questionnaire on Pointing Gesture, which al-lowed the identification of babies able to use pointing in familiar contexts. Of thesechildren, 40 participated in the experiment and were tested on 2 tasks: a new task de-signed to elicit production and comprehension of imperative and declarative pointing,and a modified version of Meltzoff’s (1995) task designed to assess understanding ofothers’intentions. Tasks were administered to each participant in 2 sessions carried outat 3-month intervals. Children were 12 months old on average at the 1st session and 15months old on average at the 2nd session. Results showed that children produced and

INFANCY, 5(3), 291–308Copyright © 2004, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Requests for reprints should be sent to Paola Perucchini, Department of Educational Science, Uni-versity of Roma Tre, Via del Castro Pretorio 20, 00185 Rome, Italy. E-mail: [email protected]

understood declarative pointing later than imperative pointing. Furthermore, produc-tion of declarative pointing was clearly linked to understanding of others’ intentions.No relation was found between production and comprehension of imperative pointingand intention understanding. Implications from the association between declarativepointing and inferring other’s intentions are discussed.

In the rich literature on the development of theory of mind, several proposals havebeen advanced on the origins of theory of mind in infancy (for reviews, see Flavell,2000; Meltzoff, Gopnik, & Repacholi, 1999; Moore, 1996). The central questionto answer is whether and how we may identify, before 3 years of age, simpler ca-pacities or precursors to the understanding of mind. According to Meltzoff et al.,researchers have discovered a good deal about social understanding in infants anda good deal about social cognition and theory of mind in 3- to 5-year-olds but notenough about what happens in between. The 15- to 36-month-old age range re-mains partially mysterious. In these “dark ages,” the well-established techniquessuitable for infants do not work anymore. On the other hand it is not possible to usetasks demanding subtle language abilities children have not yet mastered. A fewtechniques, however, have been developed to test toddlers, such as the behavioralreenactment procedure and the social referencing procedure.

Using the first technique, Meltzoff (1995) demonstrated that 18-month-oldscan infer what another person is trying to perform, even though the person is un-successful in his or her attempts and never actually shows the intended act.Bellagamba and Tomasello (1999) found that the performance of 12-month-olds inthis task differs from that of 18-month-olds. Whereas 18-month-olds are able to in-fer the goal of another person after seeing only his or her unsuccessful attempts,12-month-olds are less able to imitate unsuccessful goal-directed actions. Thisfinding suggests that by 18 months children certainly understand that people’s ac-tions are goal directed and intentional. Adopting a more sophisticated version ofthe social referencing procedure, Repacholi and Gopnik (1997) documented how18-month-olds are able to give the experimenter a food that he or she reacts to withpleasure rather than one toward which he or she reacts with disgust, even whenthey themselves prefer the latter food (so reasoning nonegocentrically about peo-ple’s desires). Moreover, Repacholi (1998) showed that 14-month-olds understandthat the adult’s emotional expressions of disgust and joy are directed at particularobjects, even though they had not seen the emotions and the objects at the sametime. Interestingly, both these techniques explore what toddlers know about themind without relying on language.

At a theoretical level, researchers have suggested different precursors to the de-velopment of a theory of mind. Baron-Cohen (1995) proposed a system of four in-formation-processing modules designed by evolution for mind reading. Interest-ingly, one of the earlier developing modules is the shared attention mechanism thatcomes on line toward the end of the first year and is responsible for shared atten-tion. Meltzoff and Gopnik (1993) assigned a critical role to the infants’ ability to

292 CAMAIONI, PERUCCHINI, BELLAGAMBA, COLONNESI

imitate and to their understanding of the equivalence of self and other as the basicelements of a theory of mind. According to this proposal, understanding inten-tional action in other people is rooted in appreciating the correspondence betweenself and other. Camaioni (1993) argued that one of the earliest manifestations ofmind understanding is the child’s capacity to represent and influence the other per-son’s attentional state about an object or event in the world. This capacity—calleddeclarative intentional communication—is never mastered by nonhuman primatesand is severely impaired in children with autism (Tomasello & Camaioni, 1997).

By the end of their first year of life (9–12 months) infants begin to use commu-nicative gestures to actively direct adult attention to outside entities in triadic inter-actions. First and most important are deictic gestures such as pointing, showing,and offering, usually accompanied by the infant’s looking at the adult in alterna-tion with looks to the object (for a review, see Camaioni, 1997). The alternation ofgaze between the object and the adult indicates that the child is aware of the effectshis or her signals will have on the other person (cf. Bates, Benigni, Bretherton,Camaioni, & Volterra, 1979; Bretherton, 1991). As Tomasello and Camaioni(1997) documented, the key difference between human infants and chimpanzees isthat infants use their deictic gestures—and especially pointing—not only for im-perative purposes (to obtain a desired object or event) but also for declarative pur-poses (to share with another person interest or attention to some object or event).According to Tomasello and Camaioni, imperative gestures may operate as a kindof social tool use, relying on a simple expectation that persons can act as autono-mous causal agents to make things happen. Declarative gestures, on the otherhand, rely on an understanding of other persons as possessing a psychological di-mension (i.e., the capacity to have intentional and attentional relations to the worldthat may be shared by others). This is a new and unique understanding, not reduc-ible to a simple understanding of the efficacy of others as causal agents. The ideathat the two types of gesture might rely on different sociocognitive underpinningsis confirmed by experimental studies of autistic children’s ability to produce andunderstand the pointing gesture (Baron-Cohen, 1989; Camaioni, Perucchini,Muratori, & Milone, 1997; Camaioni, Perucchini, Muratori, Parrini, & Cesari,2003). These studies show that children with autism have severe difficulties both inproducing and in comprehending declarative pointing, whereas imperative point-ing is usually preserved in their repertoire even though delayed.

As far as typically developing children are concerned, preliminary results docu-ment a temporal décalage between imperative and declarative pointing in1-year-olds for both comprehension and production (Perucchini & Camaioni,1993). Children were tested at 11 and 14 months of age using a newly devised taskthat evaluates production and comprehension of pointing gestures. The majority ofchildren produced and understood imperative pointing earlier than declarativepointing. However, 32% of the participants tested exhibited the two types of point-ing already at 11 months of age, so revealing that children may be precocious (orlate) with regard to their production and comprehension of pointing gestures.

DECLARATIVE POINTING AND THEORY OF MIND 293

The goal of verifying the expected developmental sequence in the emergence ofimperative and declarative pointing is made difficult by the presence of a largevariation between individuals in the onset age of pointing as well as in its rate ofdevelopment (see also Desrochers, Morissette, & Ricard, 1995). To address this is-sue, we constructed a new parent report instrument, the Questionnaire on PointingGesture (QPOINT), designed primarily for gathering information on pointing ges-tures used by children at home as soon as they start to point with the index finger.The QPOINT demonstrated good reliability and sensitivity to individual variation(Perucchini & Camaioni, 1999).

In the recent literature on pointing, another issue still debated is the relation be-tween production and comprehension of the gesture. One reasonable hypothesis isthat the relation between production and comprehension of pointing is analogousto the one observed between comprehensive and expressive aspects of language;that is, comprehension precedes production (see Camaioni, 2001). This hypothesisis far from being verified. Lempers (1979), in a cross-sectional study, andDesrochers, Morissette, and Ricard (1995), in a longitudinal study, both found norelation between comprehension and production of communicative pointing ges-tures. On the other hand, Carpenter, Nagell, and Tomasello (1998), examining lon-gitudinally 9- to 15-month-olds, found that two thirds of these babies followed apoint before or in the same month as they pointed themselves, whereas for the re-maining participants production preceded comprehension of pointing. These con-tradictory results are based, however, on limited samples of participants.

Inspired by earlier work, in this study we aimed at testing three predictions: (a)In typically developing children comprehension of communicative pointing ges-tures precedes production of the same gesture; (b) in typically developing childrendeclarative pointing emerges later than imperative pointing; and (c) the capacity touse declarative pointing is linked to the understanding of others’ intentions, evalu-ated as the capacity to reproduce others’ intended acts after seeing failed attemptsto perform these acts. On the other hand, no relation was expected between pro-duction and comprehension of imperative pointing and intention understanding.

The study was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, the QPOINT was ad-ministered to identify children who had started to use pointing in familiar contexts,and to verify the expected interindividual variation in the onset age of communica-tive pointing. In the second phase, children reported as able to use pointing in fa-miliar contexts were asked to participate in an experiment, carried out to verify thepreceding predictions.

METHOD

Participants

A total of 133 infants (63 girls and 70 boys; 83 firstborn; age: M = 11 months 10days, range = 8–14 months) participated in the first phase of the study. They were


recruited from day care centers and pediatricians’ offices and were all healthy andnormally developing. The infants came from two-parent families of middle to up-per socioeconomic status (as determined by parental educational level), living inthe city of Rome. Parents received the QPOINT questionnaire when their infantswere about 7 months old and they were asked to fill in the questionnaire as soon astheir infants started to use the pointing gesture. The total number of mailed ques-tionnaires was 150. Six questionnaires got lost (were never returned by parents),and 11 questionnaires were not valid (i.e., parents filled them in too late, more than3 weeks after the child started to point).

Forty-two children (21 girls and 21 boys) took part in the second phase of thestudy. Children were tested in the university laboratory at two ages: when theystarted to use the pointing gesture (about 10 days after the QPOINT questionnairewas completed) and 3 months later. At the first experimental session childrenranged in age from 9 to 14 months (M = 11 months 22 days, SD = 1 month 4 days),and at the second session they ranged from 12 to 17 months (M = 14 months 22days, SD = 1 month 4 days). At each session, parents were given D 20.00 to reim-burse their travel expenses. Two children were not included in the final sample; 1girl did not complete the second session, and 1 boy did not complete all trials dueto fussiness.

Setting and Stimuli

Children were tested in a laboratory room. Each child was tested while seated onhis or her parent’s lap, in front of a rectangular table. In the pointing task, the ex-perimenter sat on the side of the table (at a 90° angle) facing the child. In the under-standing of intention task, the experimenter sat in front of the child. All sessionswere videotaped. The laboratory was equipped with two cameras remotely con-trolled from a dark room located behind a one-way mirror. For the pointing task,Camera 1 focused on the frontal view of the experimental setting including child,mother, experimenter, table, and experimental objects. Camera 2 focused on theupper view of the infant’s face and torso. For the understanding of intention task,Camera 1 focused on a lateral view of child, experimenter, and objects. Camera 2focused on the upper view of the infant’s face and torso. Both perspectives wereedited in the videotape. The experiment was electronically timed by a generatorthat mixed elapsed time in seconds and milliseconds onto the video records forsubsequent scoring.

Proximal stimuli used in the pointing task were a wind-up toy car, a musicalbox, a toy telephone, and a toy horse. Distal stimuli used in the pointing task weremobile airplanes, a mobile bird, a flashing light, and a multicolored picture on thewall (see Figure 1).

Stimuli used in the understanding of intention task were exact duplicates of thoseused by Meltzoff (1995). There were five object sets: a dumbbell-shaped toy, a boxwith a stick tool, a prong and loop, a cylinder and beads, and a square and post.


Materials and Procedure

Phase 1 of the Study

Parents were asked to fill in the QPOINT. The QPOINT is a structured ques-tionnaire composed of two closed list items, one relative to imperative pointing (8items) and the other relative to declarative pointing (8 items). The items specifydifferent situations in which the child may use pointing gestures at home. One listincludes situations concerning the child’s intention to request an action or an ob-ject to somebody (e.g., the child points at the home’s door to go out). The other listincludes situations concerning the child’s intention to share his or her attentionwith somebody (e.g., the child points in the direction of an unexpected noise). Foreach item, the parent (usually the mother) has to mark if the child points in the situ-ation specified and how often (e.g., 1–2 times, several times). Parents were askedto fill in the QPOINT as soon as their child started to point for communicative pur-poses at home (i.e., within 2 weeks since the child’s first use of pointing noted bythe parent), and to mail the completed questionnaire to the university laboratorythrough special mail.

Phase 2 of the Study

As soon as we received the completed questionnaire, we contacted the parentsby phone to invite them to take part in the experiment. Children whose parentsagreed to come to the lab were tested on the two tasks, a pointing task designed to


FIGURE 1 Experimental setting for the pointing task.

evaluate comprehension and production of imperative and declarative pointing,and the understanding of intention task (Meltzoff, 1995), designed to evaluate un-derstanding of others’ intentions. Each child was tested on both tasks in two subse-quent sessions, carried out at a 3-month interval. Order of task administration wasrandom. Sex of children was balanced across order. Two research assistants, bothwomen, served as experimenters. Each session began with a warm-up period inwhich the child played with the experimenter until he or she seemed acclimated tothe room and the experimenter.

The pointing task. This task comprises four experimental conditions de-signed toelicit imperativeanddeclarativepointing, inproductionand incomprehen-sion: (a1) imperative production and (a2) imperative comprehension, (b1) declara-tive production and (b2) declarative comprehension. In Conditions a1 and a2,proximal stimuli were used so that a manipulable object was located near the experi-menter and far from the child (i.e., out of his or her reach). In Conditions b1 and b2,distal stimuliwereused, so that aneventoccurred far fromboth theexperimenter andthe child. The four conditions were presented in a random order. Each condition hadeight trials with two different stimuli, the first four trials with one stimulus and thelast four trials with the other stimulus. At the beginning of each trial, the experi-menter made eye contact with the child and said, “Hi [the child’s name].”

• (a1) Imperative production (eight trials, four for each proximal stimulus): Ineach trial, the experimenter activated a musical box or a wind-up car (moving forabout 10 sec and then stopping) and looked silently at the child for 15 sec (waitingfor the child’s reaction). The experimenter said, “Isn’t it pretty? Do you like it?”and looked silently at the child for 15 sec (waiting for the child’s reaction). Thenthe experimenter gave the toy to the child.

• (b1) Declarative production (eight trials, four for each distal stimulus): Ineach trial, the experimenter surreptitiously activated a mobile (airplanes or bird)hanging from the ceiling in front of the child and behind herself and looked silentlyat the child for 15 sec (waiting for the child’s reaction). The mobile moved forabout 10 sec and then stopped. The experimenter then said, “What happened?”without turning back to look at the mobile, and looked silently at the child for 15sec (waiting for the child’s reaction). Then the experimenter turned back to look atthe mobile and named it.

• (a2) Imperative comprehension (eight trials, four for each proximal stimulus):In each trial, the experimenter showed the child a toy horse or telephone that could bepulled apart into two pieces and put back together. The experimenter gave a piece(thehorse’s tailor thephonereceiver) to thechild, lookedat thepiece inherhand,andsaid, “Oops, there is no horse’s head/push-button phone!” The experimenter pointedat the piece in the child’s hand, looking at the child and at the stimulus. Then the ex-perimenter lookedsilentlyat thechild for15sec(waitingfor thechild’s reaction).


• (b2) Declarative comprehension (eight trials, four for each distal stimulus):In each trial, the experimenter pointed at a flashing light or a picture on the wall,looking at the child and at the stimulus. Then the experimenter looked silently atthe child for 15 sec (waiting for the child’s reaction).

The understanding of intention task. All children were administered thedemonstration of intention condition of this task (see Meltzoff, 1995). The experi-menter modeled the intention to perform the act for the child; that is, the experi-menter was seen to try but fail to perform the target act on each of five objects.These objects were presented in a random order. The intention to produce the actwas modeled three times in approximately 20 sec and was followed by a 20-sec re-sponse period for each test object. The experimenter did not provide linguistic orfacial expressions of failure.

Coding and Measures

What follows are the procedural definitions for scoring target behaviors in thepointing task and target actions in the understanding of intention task.

In the pointing task production conditions (a1 and b1), a two-step coding proce-dure was adopted based on our previous study (Perucchini & Camaioni, 1993) aswell as on Carpenter et al. (1998). Children’s pointing gestures were coded as in-tentionally communicative, first, and then as imperatives or declaratives. Pointingwas defined as arm and index finger extension in the direction of the stimulus(without touching it) while the remaining fingers were curled lightly or tightly un-der the hand (Franco & Butterworth, 1996). Any stimulus-directed pointing ges-ture produced by the child was coded as intentionally communicative when look-ing at the experimenter’s face occurred within 2 sec before or after pointing orwhen pointing and looking at the experimenter’s face occurred simultaneously(following Franco & Butterworth, 1996). Only one pointing gesture produced bythe child was counted in each trial. The communicative intent, whether imperativeor declarative, of the child’s pointing gesture was coded in each trial according tothe following operational definitions:

• (a1) Imperative production: The child produced a pointing gesture and in ad-dition at least one of the following target behaviors: made a request gesture, leanedforward or reached for the stimulus, produced a request vocalization or aproto-word or whined, or pointed at the stimulus repeatedly (two or more times).1


1Request gesture, request vocalization, and proto-word were defined as follows: Request gesturewas an arm extension with opening and closing of the hand (eventually repeated) toward the target ob-ject, or with hand open and palm up or down; request vocalization was a bisyllabic sound (e.g., dada)used repeatedly and insistently, with rising intonation; proto-word was an onomatopoeic or an idiosyn-cratic sound that has a specific meaning for the child and is associated with a specific referent (e.g.,brum-brum for car; ca-ca for duck).

• (b1) Declarative production: The child produced a pointing gesture and inaddition at least one of the following target behaviors: smiled or vocalized towardthe stimulus, produced a proto-word or a word relative to the stimulus, or reenactedwhat the stimulus did.

In the pointing task comprehension conditions (a2 and b2), as in the productionconditions, a two-step coding procedure was adopted. First, the child had to cor-rectly localize the stimulus pointed to by the experimenter by looking at it (see thedifferent locations of distal stimuli in Figure 1). Second, comprehension of thecommunicative intent, whether imperative or declarative, of the experimenter’spointing was attributed to the child according to the following operational defini-tions (only one comprehension was counted in each trial):

• (a2) Imperative comprehension: After the experimenter’s pointing, the childproduced at least one of the following target behaviors: gave the stimulus to the ex-perimenter, refused to give the stimulus to the experimenter, said “yes” or “no” ormade the corresponding gesture with the head, or left the stimulus on the table nearthe experimenter looking at her.

• (b2) Declarative comprehension: After the experimenter’s pointing, thechild produced at least one of the following target behaviors: smiled or vocalizedtoward the stimulus, produced a proto-word or a word relative to the stimulus, orreenacted what the stimulus did looking at the experimenter.

In the four conditions of the pointing task each trial was scored 1 if the childproduced the target behavior (score range was 0–8 in each condition).

In the understanding of intention task, the number of target actions produced byeach child on all objects was scored. The operational definitions of performing thetarget actions for each set of objects were those defined by Meltzoff (1995) in theoriginal work; that is, the child pulled the object apart (dumbbell-shaped toy), thechild used the stick tool to push the button and activated the buzzer (box with astick tool), the child hung the nylon loop over the prong so that the prong protrudedthrough it (prong and loop), the child lowered the beads into the cylinder (cylinderand beads), and the child placed the plastic square over the wooden dowel so thatthe dowel protruded through the hole (square and post). The score on this taskranged from 0 to 5.

Measures for the pointing task were the proportion of target behaviors out of to-tal number of valid trials. Trials were not valid when the child did not attend to theexperimenter’s behavior nor to the stimulus. Mean percentages of nonvalid trials inSession 1 were 1.8% and 10% for production and comprehension conditions, re-spectively. Mean percentages of nonvalid trials in Session 2 were 2.1% and 4.4%for production and comprehension conditions, respectively. In general, the propor-tions of nonvalid trials were low, especially in production conditions. Nonvalid tri-als were relatively more frequent in comprehension conditions, which were more


demanding for children, especially in the first session because they required a sus-tained orientation toward what the experimenter was doing.

For the understanding of intention task, the measure was the proportion of tar-get actions out of total number of trials. No trial was nonvalid in the understandingof intention task.

Reliability

Two independent observers coded a random selection of 25% of the videotapedsessions to assess reliability. These observers were blind to the hypotheses of thestudy and were trained independently. Reliability was measured by Cohen’skappa. In the pointing task, reliability was assessed for the target behavior and forthe nonvalid trial in each of the four conditions separately. For imperative produc-tion, kappa values ranged from .96 to 1.0, and for imperative comprehension, theyranged from .81 to 1.0 in both sessions. For declarative production, kappa valuesranged from .90 to 1.0, and for declarative comprehension, they ranged from .80 to1.0 in both sessions. Ambiguous cases were resolved by joint viewing and discuss-ing with the aid of a third observer. Reliability was high across conditions.

In the understanding of intention task, reliability was measured on the target ac-tion with a kappa of 1.0 at the first session and a kappa of .91 at the second session.

RESULTS

Proportions were used as dependent variables (see the Method section) and sub-mitted to arcsine transformation. For ease of comprehension, mean scores andstandard deviations reported throughout the article are those for the untransformedproportions. For the pointing task, no significant effects of condition order andtype of stimuli were found in preliminary analyses. For the understanding of inten-tion task, object order showed no significant effect on the dependent variable. Inneither task was gender or task order significant.

Variability in the Emergence of Pointing From the QPOINT

Children started to use pointing on average at 10 months 29 days (SD = 1 month14 days). As shown in Figure 2, onset age of pointing gesture in our sample of133 participants approximated a normal distribution. Seventy-one percent of thechildren began to point between 10 and 12 months of age, and 91% of them be-gan to point between 9 and 13 months. These data confirm that there is a largeinterindividual variability in the onset age of pointing.

A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted with gender as a be-tween-subjects factor on the onset age of pointing. A significant effect of gender,F(1, 131) = 5.17, p = .02, indicated that girls (M = 10 months 20 days, SD = 1


month 11 days) started to point earlier than boys (M = 11 months 7 days, SD = 1month 14 days).

Comprehension and Production of Pointing

To test our first prediction on the relation between comprehension and production,repeated-measures ANOVAs were conducted for imperative and declarative point-ing separately, with session (1 vs. 2) and modality (comprehension vs. production)as within-subjects factors. As far as imperative pointing is concerned, there weresignificant main effects of session, F(1, 39) = 8.17, p = .007, and of modality, F(1,39) = 8.68, p = .005. At both sessions, children were better able to understand thanto produce pointing (see Table 1). On declarative pointing, there were again signif-icant main effects of session, F(1, 39) = 69.75, p < .0001, and of modality, F(1, 39)= 70.71, p < .0001, indicating that, at both sessions, children were better able to un-derstand than to produce pointing (see Table 1). In summary, in typical develop-ment comprehension of imperative as well as of declarative pointing precedes pro-duction of the same gesture. As expected, both imperative and declarative pointingincreased as children became older, in both comprehension and in production.

Imperative and Declarative Pointing

To test our second prediction on the developmental sequence in the emergence ofdifferent intentions of pointing, repeated-measures ANOVAs were carried out for


FIGURE 2 Onset age of pointing gesture in 133 children from the QPOINT.

comprehension and production separately, with session (1 vs. 2) and intention (im-perative vs. declarative) as within-subjects factors. As far as comprehension isconcerned, there were significant main effects of session, F(1, 39) = 24.80, p <.0001, and intention, F(1, 39) = 6.47, p = .01. These main effects were qualified bya significant Session × Intention interaction, F(1, 39) = 11.93, p < .001. Subse-quent post hoc analyses (Scheffé test) revealed that, at Session 1, imperative point-ing was significantly higher than declarative pointing, and that, at Session 2 com-pared to Session 1, only declarative pointing increased significantly, exhibitingalmost the same score as imperative pointing (see Table 1).

The analysis for production revealed significant main effects of session, F(1,39) = 32.59, p < .0001, and intention, F(1, 39) = 43.11, p < .0001, indicating that, atboth sessions, imperative pointing was significantly higher than declarative point-ing (see Table 1).

In summary, children comprehended and produced more imperative than de-clarative pointing at an earlier age. As children became older, their production andcomprehension of declarative pointing increased as well as their production of im-perative pointing. According to results from ANOVAs reported in the previoussection, children were more advanced in comprehension than in production when


TABLE 1Proportions (Means and Standard Deviations)

for the Pointing Task Measures

Session 1 Session 2 Session 1 + 2 (Mean)

ComprehensionImperative

M .49 .57 .53SD .32 .33 .32

DeclarativeM .26 .59 .42SD .20 .23 .21

Imperative + declarative (mean)M .37 .58SD .26 .28

ProductionImperative

M .30 .46 .38SD .25 .29 .27

DeclarativeM .10 .27 .19SD .17 .23 .20

Imperative + declarative (mean)M .20 .36SD .21 .26

they started to use pointing gestures at the first session. Three months later, theirdeclarative comprehension had reached the same level as their imperative compre-hension, whereas their declarative production remained lower than their impera-tive production.

Relation Between Pointing and Intention Understanding

A repeated-measures ANOVA was conducted on the target acts produced by chil-dren in the understanding of intention task, with session as a within-subjects factor.There was a main effect of session, F(1, 39) = 69.75, p < .0001, indicating that chil-dren produced more target acts at Session 2 (M = 3.02, SD = 1.27) than at Session 1(M = 1.27, SD = 1.13). Because the same experimental objects were used in bothsessions, the finding that children produced significantly more target acts in Ses-sion 2 than in Session 1 might be due to the earlier practice. However, it is impor-tant to consider that no “complete” or successful target action was shown to thechild but only a failed attempt to perform the target action for each set of objects.Therefore the only modeled action that might have been learned was the experi-menter’s failed attempt. To explore the possibility that children learned to repro-duce the actual movement shown by the experimenter, we also coded all thereenactments of the model’s failed attempt. This kind of response was very rareboth in Session 1 (3%) and in Session 2 (1.5%) and decreased as children grew up.We therefore feel confident in excluding the possibility that the increase of targetactions from Session 1 to Session 2 might be due to a learning effect.

Interestingly, the mean number of target actions produced by our participants atSession 1, when they were 12 months old on average, was almost the same as thatpreviously reported by Bellagamba and Tomasello (1999) for 12-month-olds (M =1.1). In sum, as they grew up, children produced more target acts in this task, andtheir performance was significantly different at the two sessions.

To test our third prediction, concerning the link between the capacity to use de-clarative pointing and the understanding of others’ intentions, all the participantswere classified as “high” or “low” with regard to their performance on the under-standing of intention task. At each session, a participant was considered high in in-tention understanding when he or she obtained a score greater than the median ofthe sample. If not, the participant was classified as low in intention understanding.At the first session, 23 children (M age = 11 months 11 days, SD = 1 month 4 days)were classified as low in intention understanding, with 0- to 1-point scores, and 17children (M age = 12 months 3 days, SD = 1 month 0 days) were classified as highin intention understanding, with 2- to 5-point scores. At the second session, 10children (M age = 14 months 6 days, SD = 1 month 9 days) were low in intentionunderstanding, with 0- to 2-point scores, and 30 children (M age = 14 months 25days, SD = 1 month 4 days) were high in intention understanding, with 3- to5-point scores.


Because at each session the two groups were different in age range, age wastreated as a covariate in the following analyses: The two groups (high vs. low) werecompared on the pointing task measures through one-way analyses of covariance(ANCOVAs), carried out for modality (comprehension vs. production) and inten-tion (imperative vs declarative) separately.

ANCOVAs with children’s age at Session 1 as covariate revealed a significanteffect of the group factor (high vs. low) for production of declarative pointing, F(1,39) = 4.30, p = .045, with the covariate not significantly contributing to this effect.As Figure 3 shows, children with high intention understanding were more ad-vanced in producing declarative pointing, compared with low-intention-under-standing children. The two groups of children did not differ from one another inproduction of imperative pointing.

ANCOVAs with children’s age at Session 2 as a covariate revealed a significanteffect of the group factor for production of declarative pointing, F(1, 39) = 4.69, p< .037, with the covariate not reliably contributing to this effect. As Figure 3shows, children with high intention understanding at the second session exhibiteda greater production of declarative pointing compared with low-intention-under-standing children. The two groups of children did not differ from one another inproduction of imperative pointing.

Taken together, these results indicate that the capacity to produce declarativepointing is linked to the understanding of other’s intentions, whereas the capacityto produce imperative pointing is not.


FIGURE 3 Production of imperative and declarative pointing (proportions as means andstandard deviations) for low- and high-intention-understanding children at Sessions 1 and 2.

As far as comprehension is concerned, the group factor had no significant effecton imperative pointing, as expected, but also no effect on declarative pointing. Thisunexpected finding might be explained by taking into account the clear trend foundin the relation between comprehension and production of pointing. Children werealways more advanced in comprehending than in producing pointing at both ses-sions, and they were also more advanced in imperative than in declarative pointing.Therefore, production of declarative pointing turned out to be the most demandingability tested through the pointing task and the only one reliably associated withunderstanding of intentions.

DISCUSSION

This study analytically investigated the development of communicative pointingwith new tasks devised to distinguish comprehension and production as well as im-perative and declarative pointing.

Concerning our first prediction, the findings of this experiment support the con-clusion that comprehension precedes production of communicative pointing ges-tures in typical development. In this respect, pointing looks similar to language,contrary to the results of previous studies showing no relation between compre-hension and production of pointing (cf. Desrochers et al., 1995; Lempers, 1979),an inverse relation (production precedes comprehension), or a pattern in whichcomprehension and production develop in parallel (cf. Carpenter et al., 1998). It isworth noting that, compared to previous studies, our finding is based on a largersample of participants longitudinally investigated.

Concerning our second prediction, the results of this study confirm the expecteddevelopmental sequence in the emergence of imperative and declarative pointing.Under controlled conditions for eliciting production and comprehension of com-municative pointing, typically developing children are able to use imperativepointing earlier than declarative pointing. This finding is consistent with the hy-pothesis that the two types of pointing do not entail the same sociocognitive capac-ities. Whereas imperative pointing relies on a simple expectation that people willfunction as causal agents, declarative pointing implies the capacity to influence theother person’s attentional state about aspects of the environment and, at the sametime, to perceive the other person as capable of understanding one’s communica-tive intentions (see Camaioni, 1993; Tomasello & Camaioni, 1997). In sum, de-clarative pointing reveals an understanding of others as intentional agents whopossess independent psychological states. Following Werner and Kaplan (1963)and Bates, Camaioni, and Volterra (1975), it could be said that declarative pointingsingles out objects of contemplation and offers them to other people to consider.

Previous studies have documented that 12-month-olds understand pointing asan object-directed action; that is, they specifically attend to the relation between


the actor and the referent of his or her point (Woodward & Guajardo, 2002) andthat by the same age infants are aware of the person’s attentional state because theyaddress communicative pointing, gazing, and vocalizations more often to peoplethan to inanimate objects (Legerstee & Barillas, 2003). Other studies have pro-posed alternative explanations, arguing that gaze following and pointing in12-month-olds are just intended to draw adult attention to self, or to enhance theinteraction, and consequently they do not involve an understanding of people as in-tentional agents (e.g., Moore & Corkum, 1994; Moore & D’Entremont, 2001). Ac-cording to these authors, the initial use of declarative pointing gestures at the endof the first year appears to be the use of an object to elicit a particular form of adultbehavior (e.g., smiles and eye contacts) toward the infant. The more recent find-ings indicate that such a lean interpretation of gaze following and pointing does notprovide a full explanation of the typical behavior exhibited by infants in their sec-ond year of life. Brooks and Meltzoff (2002) showed that infants at 12, 14, and 18months visually examine the target longer when the adult turns toward it with openeyes than with closed eyes. Legerstee and Barillas (2003) showed that12-month-olds have different conceptions about people and objects and that theycommunicate with people but not with objects. Moreover, 12-month-olds regardhumans as intentional agents because they attempt to redirect their attention so thatthey may notice that children are pointing at interesting targets.

The results of this experiment may contribute to resolving the controversyamong alternative explanations about declarative pointing illustrated so far, show-ing that there is a clear relation between production of declarative pointing and un-derstanding of others’ intentions (our third prediction). Children who are high ininferring the intended, but never actually shown and unseen, act of another person,are also more advanced in producing declarative pointing at 12 months (first exper-imental session), as well as at 15 months (second experimental session). On theother hand, no relation was found between production or comprehension of imper-ative pointing and intention understanding, as expected.

It is important to note that intention understanding as tested by Meltzoff (1995)on 18-month-olds is a quite advanced ability, in which the child has to differentiatesurface behavior from a deep level involving goals and intentions. In this study weused this task with slightly younger children, showing that they improved in solv-ing the task from the first to the second session, without reaching the performancetypical of 18-month-olds. As illustrated in the Results section, the understandingof intentions shown by 12- and 15-month-olds is linked only to declarative point-ing production, which was found to be the most demanding communicative abilitytested through the pointing task.

The fact that only the capacity to use pointing gestures declaratively is linked tothe understanding of intentions, whereas the use of pointing to request objects oractions is not, is difficult to explain without attributing to children an awareness ofpeople as intentional agents. When children are able to read below the literal sur-face behavior and interpret the person’s actions within a psychological framework


involving goals and intentions, they are also able to share interesting aspects of theworld with others and to influence the other person’s attentional state about theworld. We would suggest that declarative communication and reading intentionsshare a common mechanism that enables the child to appreciate the other person’spsychological experience in relation to an object or event of common interest.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article is dedicated to the memory of Luigia Camaioni, our mentor and friend,who prematurely died in June 2004. We will miss her much.

This research was supported by a grant to Luigia Camaioni from the ItalianMinistero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca (Programma Cofin-Murst2000, MM11267248). Portions of this research were presented at the 17th Interna-tional Society for the Study of Behavioral Development Biennal Meeting, Ottawa,Ontario, Canada, August 2002, and at the 8th World Association for Infant MentalHealth Congress, Amsterdam, July 2002. We thank the mothers and babies who par-ticipated in this study and are grateful to the research team of Elisabetta Perotti,Fabrizio Plescia, and Fabio Presaghi for their cooperation in recruitment of the par-ticipants, coding, and statistical analyses. Special thanks to a generous colleaguewho revised the manuscript stylistically.

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