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Brief Communications
Nature 413, 35-36 (6 September 2001) | doi:10.1038/35092613
Language rhythms in baby hand movements
Laura Ann Petitto1,4, Siobhan Holowka1, Lauren E. Sergio2 & David Ostry1,3
The vocal babbling sounds universally uttered by healthy babies at around 7 months of age are fascinating, and have been interpreted as reflecting both the origins of language production in humans1 and the vestiges of the evolutionary origins of language in our species2. Here we study the hand movements of hearing babies born to profoundly deaf parents and find that these children produce a class of hand activity that is distinct from other uses of their hands and which contains the specific rhythmic patterns of natural language ('silent' babbling).
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