In order to understand the relationship between gestures and language and the relevance of gestures in the development of communicative and linguistic skills, a review of national and international literature was conducted. The analysis of data from multiple areas of science indicates the cross-influences of gesture in the evolution of the communicative competence of Humankind. The identification of the human mirror system created the background for studies that generated hypotheses about the parallelism between the evolution of gesture versus the evolution of language. Literature indicates that the use of gestures has a predictive power in language development, and different periods of language development influence the components of pragmatics, semantics and morphosyntax. The influence of natural gesture for communicative competence continues throughout life, since co-speech gestures have the purpose to disambiguate the content of the message to the interlocutor and to organize verbal reasoning for the speaker. Using natural gestures in promoting communication and linguistic skills in children with prelinguistic communication disorders has become essential, but it requires deeper knowledge as studies related to the early pragmatic skills are mainly directed towards the pointing gesture. Studies that analyzed other groups of gestures in older children have also contributed for understanding the use of gestures and the development of semantic and morphosyntactic competencies.
Gestures; Nonverbal communication; Language; Deafness; Communication disorders