Language, Interaction and Acquisition - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2017

The aim of this special issue is to present and pursue the challenging discussions about the links between gestures and signs and their theoretical and methodological impact that took place during the GDR ADYLOC workshop (GDR CNRS 3195) on April 4–5 2014 at Sorbonne Nouvelle University in Paris. The ADYLOC research group (led by Maya Hickmann and financed by the CNRS between 2009 and 2015) assembled a large number of French specialists around the topic Languages, Oral Language and Cognition: Acquisition and Dysfunction. This setting favored high quality scientific exchanges that brought about new questions, opened new fields and lead to a number of collective research projects.

What is linguistic communication and what is it not? Even if we often convey meanings through visible bodily actions, these are rarely considered part of human language. However, co-verbal gestures have compositional structure and semantic significance, while highly iconic structures are essential in sign languages. This paper offers a review of major studies conducted in our lab on the continuity from actions to gestures to words/signs in development. After a brief introduction, we show how gestures may bridge the gap between actions and words and how this interrelationship extends beyond early childhood and across cultures. We stress the role of sign language and multimodal communication in the study of language as a form of action and present recent research on motoric aspects of human communication. Studying the visible actions of speakers and signers leads to a revision of the traditional dichotomy between linguistic and enacted, and to the development of a new approach to embodied language.

Gesture can illustrate objects and events in the world by iconically reproducing elements of those objects and events. Children do not begin to express ideas iconically, however, until after they have begun to use conventional forms. In this paper, we investigate how children’s use of iconic resources in gesture relates to the developing structure of their communicative systems. Using longitudinal video corpora, we compare the emergence of manual iconicity in hearing children who are learning a spoken language (co-speech gesture) to the emergence of manual iconicity in a deaf child who is creating a manual system of communication (homesign). We focus on one particular element of iconic gesture – the shape of the hand (handshape). We ask how handshape is used as an iconic resource in 1–5-year-olds, and how it relates to the semantic content of children’s communicative acts. We find that patterns of handshape development are broadly similar between co-speech gesture and homesign, suggesting that the building blocks underlying children's ability to iconically map manual forms to meaning are shared across different communicative systems: those where gesture is produced alongside speech, and those where gesture is the primary mode of communication.

Stefanini, Bello, Caselli, Iverson, & Volterra (2009) reported that Italian 24–36 month old children use a high proportion of representational gestures to accompany their spoken responses when labelling pictures. The two studies reported here used the same naming task with (1) typically developing 24–46-month-old hearing children acquiring English and (2) 24–63-month-old deaf children of deaf and hearing parents acquiring British Sign Language (BSL) and spoken English. In Study 1 children scored within the range of correct spoken responses previously reported, but produced very few representational gestures. However, when they did gesture, they expressed the same action meanings as reported in previous research. The action bias was also observed in deaf children of hearing parents in Study 2, who labelled pictures with signs, spoken words and gestures. The deaf group with deaf parents used BSL almost exclusively with few additional gestures. The function of representational gestures in spoken and signed vocabulary development is considered in relation to differences between native and non-native sign language acquisition.

This article analyses the development of a composite communicative posture, the shrug (which can combine palm-up flips, lifted shoulders and a head tilt), in a video corpus of spontaneous interactions between a typically developing British girl, Ellie, and her mother, filmed at home one hour each month from Ellie’s tenth month to her fourth birthday. The systematic coding of every shrug yields a total of 124 tokens (Ellie: 98; her mother: 26), providing results in terms of forms, functions and input. Ellie’s first shrug components emerge from non-linguistic actions and she acquires them one at a time starting with the hands: these features recall the development of complex signs among deaf children of the same age ( Reilly & Anderson, 2002 for ASL). The functions of Ellie’s shrugs gradually diversify from the expression of absence at 1;04 to other epistemic and non-epistemic meanings (affective and dynamic). Adult intervention plays a crucial role as adults recurrently equate Ellie’s physical movements with speech, thereby contributing to the emergence of their communicative functions as gestural emblems ( Ekman & Friesen, 1969 ).

Based on her observation of two deaf children acquiring American Sign Language (ASL) who stopped pointing to persons at around 12 months and then produced reversal errors, Petitto (1987) argued that the discontinuous development of gestures and signs gives support to the hypothesis that language does not arise from general cognitive processes. However, since then, a large amount of studies on hearing children have suggested that early pointing was strongly related to later language abilities. In this paper, we follow up on these socio-cognitive approaches, with a dataset comparable to Petitto’s. We study the development of pointing and self-reference in a deaf child acquiring French Sign Language (LSF). We focus on self-reference rather than self-points, and suggest that, despite the apparent discontinuity in the production of self-points, there is continuity in the establishment of self-reference. In our data, the child produces self-points early on. She then uses predicates without overt subject before entering more complex syntax by combining predicates and self-points. The deaf signing child constructs self-reference similarly to speaking children and uses specific forms provided by her linguistic environment according to her cognitive, social and linguistic development.

Cet article présente une étude de cas de l’expression de la négation jusqu’à 3 ans chez quatre enfants évoluant dans des environnements langagiers différents : majoritairement monolingue (anglais, français, LSF) ou bilingue (LSF-français), majoritairement unimodal (modalité visuo-gestuelle de la LSF) ou bimodal (visuo-gestuelle et audio-vocale). Nous décrivons l’émergence et le développement d’une expression gestuelle multimodale, selon que la langue cible intègre (LSF) ou non (anglais, français) cette gestuelle dans sa grammaire, et explorons ainsi l’interface geste-signe. Nous nous attardons sur deux formes gestuelles présentes dans les productions de quatre enfants pour en déterminer les invariants kinésiologiques sous forme de « patrons gestuels contrastifs » et nous analysons la façon dont ces patrons dessinent des sous-ensembles sémantiques dans l’expression gestuelle de la négation et son acquisition.