Gesture - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2012

The aim of the present study was to evaluate relationships between early production of gesture, gesture-plus-word combinations and transitional forms on successive lexical and syntactic skills. Twenty-four children interacting with their mothers were observed. We found that complementary gesture-plus-word combinations and transitional forms use at 18 months were related with lexical skill and MLU — but not with utterance complexity — at 24 months; supplementary gesture-plus-word combinations use at 18 months, instead, was related with utterance complexity, but not with lexical skill and MLU. These relationships are explained in terms of increasing communicative competence in the child and also in terms of the adult’s contribution to linguistic development.

The aim of this study was to examine longitudinally gestural and vocal coordination in multimodal communicative patterns during the period of transition to first words, and its role in early lexical development. Eleven monolingual Spanish children were observed from 9 to 12 and 15 months of age in a semi-structured play situation. We obtained three main findings: (1) the use of multimodal patterns of communication increases significantly with age during the period studied; (2) the rate of use of those multimodal patterns at 12 months predicts lexical development at 15 months; and (3) the use of the pointing gesture at 12 months, especially when it is accompanied with vocalization and social use of gaze, is the best predictor of lexical outcome at 15 months. Our findings support the idea that gestures, gazes and vocalizations are part of an integrated and developing system that children use flexibly to communicate from early on. The coordination of these three types of elements, especially when a pointing gesture is involved, has a predictive value on early lexical development and appears as a key for progress in language development.

In the linguistic-gestural representation of motion events, the past studies showed that manner and path in English are mentioned within one clause, and the two components can be represented together in one gesture. In Turkish and Japanese, they are expressed separately in two clauses, and two separate gestures — one for manner and one for path — are produced accordingly. The present study investigates the linguistic-gestural expression of motion in Mandarin Chinese discourse, and finds that Mandarin speakers predominantly use simple manner verbs to express manner and serial verbs and prepositional phrases to convey path within a clause. In gestural representation, speakers prefer to depict path information only within a clause, be it carrying new or given information. The cross-linguistic differences demonstrate language specificity in linguistic encodings and manual depictions of motion. Such variation in how speech and gesture are used can further suggest language specificity in the conceptualization of motion events.

The present study investigated the correlation between speakers’ self-reported Big Five personality traits (extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience) and their representational gesture production. In addition, possible interactions between the speakers’ personality traits and the social situation, specifically whether the gestures could be seen by the listener or not, were examined. We found that extraversion and neuroticism both positively correlated with representational gesture production. We also found an interaction between extraversion and visibility condition. While speakers produce more gestures when their audience can see them than when their audience cannot, this difference is smaller for speakers who report high levels of extraversion than it is for other speakers. The findings suggest that both the personality of the speaker as well as aspects of the social situation are important contributors to how frequently speakers gesture.

Persons engaged in talking often make manual gestures. When a gesture or a sequence of such gestures ends, the hands are brought to a rest position. In previous work it has been observed that in such rest positions the hands tend to assume one of two poses: Collection, in which the digits are lightly semi-flexed and closed, and Stationing, in which the digits are open and the digits and palm contact the body or a surface. In previous work it has also been observed that in practical actions such as reaching, Collection occurs when advancing the hand to grasp something. This has also been observed when the hand is lifted in preparation for a gesture. Stationing has been observed to occur once the hand ends a reaching action or when the hand returns to a rest position after engaging in gesture. In light of this, it was proposed that in conversations where speakers are engaging in gesturing, hands in a rest position of Collection might reflect an intention to continue discourse, and hands in a rest position of Stationing an intention to discontinue it. Accordingly, the occurrence of Collection and Stationing was noted in video recordings of pairs of subjects in conversations in which they were trying to agree about some topic given to them for debate. A Collected hand posture was frequently associated with continuation of an argument. A Stationed hand posture was frequently associated with a speaker’s concluding statements. Listeners were also observed to show Collection and Stationed hand shapes when speakers were engaged in continuing and concluding discourse, respectively. The relationship between speech intention and resting hand postures is discussed in relation to the possible meaningful roles that resting hand shape may have in discourse.