puppy in a pet shop window. A geography teacher points to various countries on a map as he calls out their names. An angry father points at a dent in his new car and asks his teen age son, "How did that happen?" (Butterworth, 1997, p. 14).
The specific aim of the pointed finger, with a child or an adult, is not only to draw another's attention to the object pointed at, but to connect the pointer to the world and to another human being. Again, if the child's pointing is not acknowledged and/or given a positive response of some sort, usually from a parental figure, the child will begin to lose its desire and motivation to develop his communication skills. The responsiveness or non-responsiveness of a parent to a child's nonverbal communication is itself a factor of the parent's communication skills, in this case his or her ability to realize that communication through body language is being expressed by such a young being.
The child, then, begins to learns (or begins to fail to learn) such skills starting with as simple a gesture as a pointed finger. Butterworth refers to research with babies
who had just begun to point behaved when placed in a room with attractive toys just out of reach and with dolls some way off. We found that the babies (seated in highchairs next to their mothers) both reached for and pointed at the nearby toys, whereas the distant dolls elicited only pointing. Infants looked at their mothers, both while pointing and immediately afterward, to check whether they had succeeded in redirecting their attention (Butterworth, 1997, p. 16).
Lois Pineau examines the issue of date rape and, among other aspects, the role of body language and nonverbal communication in the encounter between the male and female and the outcome of that encounter. Her argument is that society and the law need to shift the emphasis away from forcing the woman to prove "an episodic act of resistance" to the man having to prove the s...