64 Yoga for Speech-Language Development
as reaching toward or pointing to the mother’s face. The most
commonly studied deictic gestures in infants are showing, giving,
reaching, and pointing, which develop with the emergence of
intentionality at around eight months. Impaired use of gestures
to express these intentions is another manifestation of the core
deficit in social interaction of young children with ASD.
After deictic gestures are used to signal objects, people, or
events in the environment, they are used to signal shared or
joint attention to an object or event. This requires that the infant
coordinate attention to an object or event with a social partner.
A lack of joint attention in infancy is an indication of the social
communication deficit in ASD and an early recognized red flag
for this developmental disability. In addition, some children with
AD/HD are so busy that they have difficulty sustaining attention
for joint attention and turn-taking activities. Joint attention is
an important communication developmental milestone, which
emerges in the intentional prelinguistic period, and is a prerequisite
to conversations (Pence Turnbull and Justice 2017), in which
topics become a shared focus between speakers. In caregiver-baby
yoga, the adult is the social partner and the movement, sounds,
or words become the object or event of focus. For example, in the
joint action routine that accompanies the song “Hop Along Yogi”
(Garabedian 2004), the baby’s turns consist of slow or fast and up
or down actions caused by the caregiver’s leg movements.
Another type of gesture, called “representational” (Crais et al.
2004), indicates or represents something. This type of gesture is
also challenging for children with ASD. For example, in a common
caregiver-infant routine, the adult asks, “How big is the baby?”
and the baby lifts his arms upward, indicating “so big.” In addition
to providing an opportunity for reciprocity and the facilitation
of language comprehension of the lexical item “big,” lifting
the baby’s arms in this routine to produce the representational
gesture has the added benefit of expanding the baby’s chest,