Pointing
The primary purpose of pointing is to indicate a direction, location, event or thing relative to a person.
[11]: 33–34 Pointing generally emerges within the first two years of life, weeks prior to a baby's first spoken word, and plays a central role in language acquisition.
[14]: 62 Infants may begin to point in situations where no one else is present, as a form of egocentric expression, termed "pointing-for-self".
[13]: 353–354 Kita specifies this variety of pointing in the context of being a deictic gesture, which is done for the benefit of an audience, as distinct from what are deemed "superficially similar behaviors".
[13]: 355, 361 In school age children, finger-pointing-reading (reading while pointing to words or letters as they are spoken) can play an important role in reading development, by helping to emphasize the association between the spoken and printed word, and encouraging children to be attentive to the meaning of text.
[17] Pointing to a location begins being deictic for deaf children and hearing alike, but becomes lexicalized for more mature signers.
Another study looked at deaf Japanese infants acquiring language from ages four months to two years, and found that the infants moved from duos (where a point plus an iconic sign referred to the same thing) to two-sign combinations where they referred to two different things.
[20] Children with autism show marked differences compared to others, and greater difficulty in their ability to interpret pointing as a form of communication, and a sign of "something interesting".
This is similar to difficulties they may experience with other deictic communication, which depend on an interpretation of the relationship between speaker and listener or on particular spatial references.
One noted exception is that of speakers of Aymara, who instead tend to associate what is in the past, what is known, with what is in the front, what is seen, and vice versa.
[32]: 82 Kita concluded similarly that "on the evidence to date only humans use the pointing gesture declarative to share attention with conspecifics.
"[2] Kovács and colleagues state "pointing as a referential communicative act seems to be unique to human behavior.
A study in 1998 by Veà and Sabater-Pi described examples of explicit declarative pointing in bonobos in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo through these observations: “Noises are heard coming from the vegetation.
He points – with his right arm stretched out and his hand half closed except for his index and ring fingers – to the position of the two groups of camouflaged observers who are in the undergrowth.”[33] This was one of the only observations of pointing in the wild by primates for years, but recently other possible examples have been documented.
[34][self-published source] Researchers claimed to observe imperative pointing gestures produced by bonobos when attempting to initiate genital rubbing,[35] as well as by chimpanzees when reaching towards objects they desired,[36] although even these researchers admitted the rarity of chimpanzee pointing in the wild.
In some, such as apes, the majority of such behavior is spontaneous (meaning without explicit training to do so), but occurs only rarely in others, such as monkeys.
[4] When present, this may be accompanied by visual monitoring of the person being interacted with, the audience of their gesture, rather than being attentive only to the object pointed at.
[4] Moreover, it seems that non-human great apes also take the perspective of the communicative partner in order to produce clear, unambiguous points.
However, Udell and colleagues [46][47] tested dogs with and without a fence, using the object choice task in a similar manner to that of a barrier.
This has also been shown in pointing as well, where barriers that are present for dogs showed lower success rates than when absent,[48] highlighting that this debate may be partially the result of systematic procedural differences.
[55] However, it seems, that the default function of pointing is different in dogs and humans, because pointing actions refer to particular locations or directions for dogs[56] in an imperative manner, while these gestures usually indicate specific objects in humans to ask for new information or to comment on an object.
[32] However, wolves fare poorly in pointing comprehension tests as well, and are a highly cooperative species, countering this hypothesis.
