According to US researchers, toddlers who use gestures generally have better vocabularies when they reach school age.
Those who convey more meanings with gestures at 14 months have larger vocabularies at four-and-a-half years and so are better prepared for school.
If parents encourage their children to use gestures, it would help them learn to speak, say psychologists from the University of Chicago.
The researchers, who studied 50 families from diverse economic backgrounds, found that children from higher-income families with well-educated parents used more gestures as toddlers and they also had higher vocabularies at school age.
Prof Susan Goldin-Meadow, one of the report's co-authors said:
"Vocabulary is a key predictor of school success and is a primary reason why children from low-income families enter school at a greater risk of failure than their peers from advantaged families."
Psychologists have long stated that families of higher income and education levels talk more with their children and speak to them in complex sentences. But the study is one of the first to focus on whether gestures, too, have an influence on vocabulary and school preparedness.
They recorded video of children with their parent, or primary caregiver, for 90-minute sessions, during ordinary home activities. Fourteen-month-old children from high-income, well-educated families used gesture to convey an average of 24 different meanings during the 90-minute session. Meanwhile, children from lower-income families conveyed only 13.
The research does not establish a link between early child gesture and later child vocabulary.
But the authors suggested two possible mechanisms by which one might encourage the other.
"Child gesture could play an indirect role in word learning by eliciting timely speech from parents; for example, in response to her child's point at the doll, mother might say, 'Yes, that's a doll,' thus providing a word for the object that is the focus of the child's attention."
The connection also may be more direct, as gestures allow children to use their hands to express meanings when they have difficulty forming words for them.
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