Young children’s developing ability to integrate gestural and emotional cues

•22-month-olds succeed choosing an item pointed at with a positive facial expression.•46-month-olds succeed avoiding an item pointed at with a negative facial expression.•The ability to avoid negated items follows u-shaped trajectory from 22 to 46 months.•Replacing pointing with peeking yields group-level success already at 34-months.•Young children might understand pointing gestures as a call to act upon objects. In three studies, children aged 22 to 46 months (N = 180) needed to integrate pointing gestures or gaze cues with positive and negative facial expressions to succeed in an object-choice task. Finding a toy required children to either choose (positive expression) or avoid (negative expression) the indicated target. Study 1 showed that 22-month-olds are better at integrating a positive facial expression with a pointing gesture compared with a negative facial expression with a pointing gesture. Study 2 tracked the integration of negative expressions and pointing across development, finding an unexpected, U-shaped trajectory with group-level success only at 46 months. Study 3 showed that already 34-month-olds succeeded when pointing was replaced with communicative gaze. These findings suggest that at the end of the second year of life, children are generally able to integrate emotional displays and communicative cues such as gestures and ostensive gaze to reevaluate and contextualize utterances. In addition, pointing gestures appear to be understood by young children as a call to act on a referenced object. Findings illustrate that communicative cues should be studied in conjunction with emotional displays to draw an ecologically valid picture of communicative development.