Age-related changes in co-speech gesture and narrative: Evidence from French children and adults

As children's language abilities develop, so may their use of co-speech gesture. We tested this hypothesis by studying oral narratives produced by French children and adults. One hundred and twenty-two participants, divided into three age groups (6years old, 10years old and adults), were asked to watch a Tom and Jerry cartoon and then tell the story to the experimenter. All narratives were videotaped, and subsequently transcribed and annotated for language and gesture using the ELAN software. The results showed a strong effect of age on language complexity, discourse construction and gesture. The age effect was only partly related to the length of the narratives, as adults produced shorter narratives than 10-year-olds. The study thus confirms that co-speech gestures develop with age in the context of narrative activity and plays a crucial role in discourse cohesion and the framing of verbal utterances. This developmental shift towards more complex narratives through both words and gestures is discussed in terms of its theoretical implications in the study of gesture and discourse development.

[1]  Sotaro Kita,et al.  How representational gestures help speaking , 2000 .

[2]  Virginie Ducey-Kaufmann.  Le cadre de la parole et le cadre du signe : un rendez-vous développemental , 2007 .

[3]  S. Kita.  Pointing: Where language, culture, and cognition meet , 2003 .

[4]  B. Butterworth,et al.  Iconic gestures, imagery, and word retrieval in speech , 1997 .

[5]  M. Bamberg.  The Acquisition of Narratives: Learning to Use Language , 1988 .

[6]  A. McCabe.  Relating events in narrative: a crosslinguistic developmental study , 1996, Journal of Child Language.

[7]  M. Fayol.  Des idées au texte, psychologie cognitive de la production verbale, orale et écrite , 2000 .

[8]  M. Knapp,et al.  The Interaction of Visual and Verbal Features in Human Communication , 1992 .

[9]  Yihsiu Chen,et al.  Language and Gesture: Lexical gestures and lexical access: a process model , 2000 .

[10]  A. Kendon.  Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance , 2004 .

[11]  E. Pizzuto,et al.  The link (and differences) between deixis and symbols in children’s early gestural-vocal system , 2005 .

[12]  Sotaro Kita,et al.  Development of cross-linguistic variation in speech and gesture: motion events in English and Turkish. , 2008, Developmental psychology.

[13]  GEOFFREY BEATTIE,et al.  Do iconic hand gestures really contribute anything to the semantic information conveyed by speech? An experimental investigation , 1999 .

[14]  Bernard Rimé,et al.  Fundamentals of nonverbal behavior , 1991 .

[15]  Michèle Guidetti.  The emergence of pragmatics: forms and functions of conventional gestures in young French children* , 2002 .

[16]  A. Kendon.  Gesticulation and Speech: Two Aspects of the Process of Utterance , 1981 .

[17]  Susan Goldin-Meadow,et al.  Language and Gesture: Gesture and the transition from one- to two-word speech: when hand and mouth come together , 2000 .

[18]  F. Récanati.  Communication et cognition , 1993 .

[19]  D. McNeill.  Language and Gesture , 2000 .

[20]  D. McNeill.  Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought , 1992 .

[21]  J. D. Ruiter.  The production of gesture and speech , 2000 .

[22]  Sotaro Kita,et al.  Relations between syntactic encoding and co-speech gestures: Implications for a model of speech and gesture production , 2007 .

[23]  Jean-Emile Gombert,et al.  Le développement métalinguistique , 1990 .

[24]  Maya Hickmann,et al.  Children's Discourse: Person, Space and Time across Languages. Cambridge Studies in Linguistics. , 2002 .

[25]  L. Tolchinsky.  The nature and scope of later language development , 2004 .

[26]  Justine Cassell,et al.  Gesture and the dynamic dimension of language : essays in honor of David McNeill , 2007 .

[27]  Virginia Volterra,et al.  Gestures and some key issues in the study of language development , 2008 .

[28]  Ruth A. Berman.  Language development across childhood and adolescence , 2004 .

[29]  Jean-Michel Passerault,et al.  Psycholinguistique textuelle : une approche cognitive de la compréhension et de la production des textes , 1996 .

[30]  Rachel I. Mayberry,et al.  Language and Gesture: Gesture production during stuttered speech: insights into the nature of gesture–speech integration , 2000 .

[31]  Michael Halliday,et al.  Cohesion in English , 1976 .

[32]  L A Thompson,et al.  Children's integration of speech and pointing gestures in comprehension. , 1994, Journal of experimental child psychology.

[33]  Susan Duncan,et al.  Growth points in thinking-for-speaking , 1998 .

[34]  Susan Goldin,et al.  The nature and functions of gesture in children's communication , 1998 .

[35]  S. Kita,et al.  How does spoken language shape iconic gestures , 2007 .

[36]  Holger Diessel,et al.  The Acquisition of Complex Sentences , 2004 .

[37]  Maya Hickmann,et al.  Learning to talk and gesture about motion in French , 2008 .

[38]  Katja Liebal,et al.  Gestural communication in nonhuman and human primates , 2007 .

[39]  H. Jisa.  Growing into academic French , 2004 .

[40]  G. Ducancel.  Michel Fayol (1979) : Des idées au texte. Psychologie cognitive de la production verbale, orale et écrite , 1997 .

[41]  Virginia Volterra,et al.  Gesture and speech : The emergence and development of a strong and changing partnership , 2008 .

[42]  V. Volterra,et al.  Gestures and words during the transition to two-word speech , 1996, Journal of Child Language.

[43]  S. Goldin-Meadow,et al.  Pointing Toward Two-Word Speech in Young Children , 2003 .

[44]  Eve V. Clark,et al.  Constructions in acquisition , 2006 .

[45]  Harriet Jisa.  Increasing cohesion in narratives: a developmental study of maintaining and reintroducing subjects in French , 2000 .

[46]  Dan Sperber,et al.  La pertinence : communication et cognition , 1989 .

[47]  Sotaro Kita,et al.  What does cross-linguistic variation in semantic coordination of speech and gesture reveal? Evidence for an interface representation of spatial thinking and speaking , 2003 .

[48]  A. Leroi‐Gourhan,et al.  Gesture and Speech , 1993 .