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- Volume 9, Issue, 2018
Language, Interaction and Acquisition - Volume 9, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 9, Issue 1, 2018
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Children’s use of gesture and action with static and dynamic verbs
Author(s): Mats Andrén and Johan Blombergpp.: 22–39 (18)More LessThe present study investigates the use of gestures by 18-, 24- and 30-month-old Swedish children, as well as their practical actions in coordination with verbs. Previous research on connections between children’s verbs and gestures has mainly focused only on iconic gestures and action verbs. We expand the research foci in two ways: we look both at gestures and at practical actions, examining how the two are coordinated with static verbs (e.g. sleep) and dynamic verbs (e.g. fall). Thanks to these additional distinctions, we have found that iconic gestures and iconic actions (the latter in particular) most commonly occurred with dynamic verbs. Static verbs were most commonly accompanied by deictic actions and deictic gestures (the latter in particular). At 30 months, deictic bodily expressions, including both gestures and actions, increased, whereas iconic expressions decreased. We suggest that this may reflect a transition to less redundant ways of using bodily expressions at 30 months, where bodily movement increasingly takes on the role of specifying verb arguments rather than expressing the semantics of the verb itself.
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Gestural depiction of motion events in narrative increases symbolic distance with age
Author(s): Kazuki Sekine, Catharine Wood and Sotaro Kitapp.: 40–68 (29)More LessWe examined gesture representation of motion events in narratives produced by three- and nine-year-olds, and adults. Two aspects of gestural depiction were analysed: how protagonists were depicted, and how gesture space was used. We found that older groups were more likely to express protagonists as an object that a gesturing hand held and manipulated, and less likely to express protagonists with whole-body enactment gestures. Furthermore, for older groups, gesture space increasingly became less similar to narrated space. The older groups were less likely to use large gestures or gestures in the periphery of the gesture space to represent movements that were large relative to a protagonist’s body or that took place next to a protagonist. They were also less likely to produce gestures on a physical surface (e.g. table) to represent movement on a surface in narrated events. The development of gestural depiction indicates that older speakers become less immersed in the story world and start to control and manipulate story representation from an outside perspective in a bounded and stage-like gesture space. We discuss this developmental shift in terms of increasing symbolic distancing ( Werner & Kaplan, 1963 ).
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French-English bilingual children’s motion event communication shows crosslinguistic influence in speech but not gesture
Author(s): Nadia Miller, Reyhan Furman and Elena Nicoladispp.: 69–100 (32)More LessBilinguals sometimes show crosslinguistic influence from one language to another while speaking (or gesturing). Adult bilinguals have also shown crosslinguistic influence in gestures as well as speech, suggesting an underlying conceptualization that is similar for both languages. The primary purpose of the present study is to test if the same is true of simultaneous French-English bilingual children in speaking and gesturing about motion. If so, they might show different patterns from both French and English monolinguals. Furthermore, we examined whether there were developmental changes between early and middle childhood. French-English bilingual and French and English monolingual children watched two cartoons and described them. In speech, the bilinguals differed from the English monolinguals, using more lexicalizations of the Path of motion in token numbers but not in type. They did not differ from the French monolinguals. In gestures, all children used a majority of Path gestures. There were few age-related changes. We argue that in speech, the bilinguals conceptualize their two languages differently, but show some crosslinguistic influence due to processing. Gestures may not show this same pattern, because they serve to highlight the important parts of the discourse.
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The impact of language on gesture in descriptions of voluntary motion in Czech and French adults and children
Author(s): Katerina Fibigerova and Michèle Guidettipp.: 101–136 (36)More LessThe present study compares adults, five- and ten-year-old speakers of Czech (a satellite-framed language) and French (a verb-framed language) during the task of describing short animated videos displaying various voluntary motion events. In this research domain, Czech is a hitherto unexplored language whose specifics make it interestingly different from other typologically similar languages. Our focus is on the semantic level of the multimodal expression of motion. We found that in spite of substantial differences in their typical verbal patterns due to the particularities of their respective languages, French speakers and Czech speakers tend to produce the same gestural patterns. Although this phenomenon was observed in all age groups, a cross-language positive effect of age on semantic density of speech as well as gesture was also found. These results are discussed in light of models of multimodal development in language acquisition.
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