Coming of age in gesture : A comparative study of gesturing and pantomiming in older children and adults

Research on the co-development of gestures and speech mainly focuses on children in early phases of language acquisition. This study investigates how children in later development use gestures to communicate, and whether the strategies they use are similar to adults’. Using a referential paradigm, we compared pantomimes and gestures produced by children (M=9) and adults, and found both groups to use gestures similarly when pantomiming, but differently in spontaneously produced gestures (in terms of frequency of gesturing, and of the representation techniques chosen to depict the objects). This suggests that older children have the necessary tools for full gestural expressivity, but when speech is available they rely less on gestures than adults, indicating both streams aren’t fully integrated yet.

[1]  Autumn B Hostetter,et al.  Gesture-speech integration in narrative: Are children less redundant than adults? , 2009, Gesture.

[2]  W. Overton,et al.  The representation of imagined objects in action sequences: a developmental study. , 1973, Child development.

[3]  T. Jaeger,et al.  Categorical Data Analysis: Away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards Logit Mixed Models. , 2008, Journal of memory and language.

[4]  C. Boustani.  Oralité et gestualité , 2009 .

[5]  R. Mayberry,et al.  Gesture Reflects Language Development , 2000 .

[6]  Emiel Krahmer,et al.  Pantomime Strategies: On Regularities in How People Translate Mental Representations into the Gesture Modality , 2014, CogSci.

[7]  V. Volterra,et al.  Lexical production in children with Williams syndrome: spontaneous use of gesture in a naming task , 2004, Neuropsychologia.

[8]  Susan Goldin-Meadow,et al.  Widening the lens: what the manual modality reveals about language, learning and cognition , 2014, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[9]  Peter Wittenburg,et al.  ELAN: a Professional Framework for Multimodality Research , 2006, LREC.

[10]  K. Pine,et al.  The Changing Role of Gesture in Linguistic Development: A Developmental Trajectory and a Cross-Cultural Comparison Between British and Finnish Children , 2012, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.

[11]  Virginia Volterra,et al.  From action to language through gesture: A longitudinal perspective , 2005 .

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

[13]  M. Studdert-Kennedy.  Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About Thought. , 1994 .

[14]  M. C. Caselli,et al.  Co-speech gestures in a naming task: Developmental data , 2009, Speech Accompanying-Gesture.

[15]  Autumn B. Hostetter,et al.  Visible embodiment: Gestures as simulated action , 2008, Psychonomic bulletin & review.

[16]  Susan Goldin-Meadow,et al.  Gesture Paves the Way for Language Development , 2005, Psychological science.

[17]  S. Goldin-Meadow,et al.  The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally , 2008, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[18]  D. McNeill.  Gesture and Thought , 2005 .

[19]  C. Boyatzis,et al.  Preschool children's symbolic representation of objects through gestures. , 1993, Child development.

[20]  Emiel Krahmer,et al.  Can you handle this? The impact of object affordances on how co-speech gestures are produced , 2015, Language, cognition and neuroscience.

[21]  G. Vigliocco,et al.  The bridge of iconicity: from a world of experience to the experience of language , 2014, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[22]  A. O'Reilly,et al.  Using representations: comprehension and production of actions with imagined objects. , 1995, Child development.

[23]  R. Mayberry,et al.  What stuttering reveals about the development of the gesture-speech relationship. , 1998, New directions for child development.