Do parents provide a helping hand to vocabulary development in bilingual children?

This was an observational study, not a treatment experiment. It shows that translated gestures were more likely to appear as later words, but it cannot prove that translation caused the vocabulary gain. The sample was small for the bilingual questions: 34 bilingual children were divided into 17 English-dominant and 17 Spanish-dominant groups. Bilingual children and parents were asked to keep each interaction in one language, but all 34 bilingual children mixed English and Spanish during interactions. This may have changed how often children used gesture in each language. Bilingual dyads had twice as long observation time as monolingual dyads (60 vs 30 minutes), although the analyses used proportions to account for this. Children were already producing word-word combinations, and they identified more referents in speech (70%) than in gesture (30%). The findings may not apply to children at the one-word stage. Dominance changed over time. Spanish-dominant children no longer differed reliably in vocabulary size between English and Spanish at age 3;6, which makes the weaker and stronger language labels less stable. The study did not measure language use outside the home or in the wider English-speaking community.

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Do not read this as evidence that labeling every child gesture will cause vocabulary growth. The study observed natural parent-child play and compared gestures that parents happened to translate with gestures they did not translate. It cannot separate parental translation from other parent-child language exchanges.