The aim of this paper is to compare speech and co-speech gestures observed during a narrative retelling task in five- and ten-year-old children from three different linguistic groups, French, American, and Italian, in order to better understand the role of age and language in the development of multimodal monologue discourse abilities. We asked 98 five- and ten-year-old children to narrate a short, wordless cartoon. Results showed a common developmental trend as well as linguistic and gesture differences between the three language groups. In all three languages, older children were found to give more detailed narratives, to insert more comments, and to gesture more and use different gestures--specifically gestures that contribute to the narrative structure--than their younger counterparts. Taken together, these findings allow a tentative model of multimodal narrative development in which major changes in later language acquisition occur despite language and culture differences.

No abstract

This study seeks to investigate the development of noun and predicate comprehension and production in isiZulu-speaking children between the ages of 25 and 36 months. It compares lexical comprehension and production in isiZulu, using an Italian developed and validated vocabulary assessment tool: The Picture Naming Game (PiNG) developed by Bello, Giannantoni, Pettenati, Stefanini and Caselli (2012). The PiNG tool includes four subtests, one each for subnoun comprehension (NC), noun production (NP), predicate comprehension (PC), and predicate production (PP). Children are shown these lexical items and then asked to show comprehension and produce certain lexical items. After adaptation into the South African context, the adapted version of PiNG was used to directly assess the lexical development of isiZulu with the three main objectives to (1) test the efficiency of the adaptation of a vocabulary tool to measure isiZulu comprehension and production development, (2) test previous findings done in many cross-linguistic comparisons that have found that both comprehension and production performance increase with age for a lesser-studied language, and (3) present our findings around the comprehension and production of the linguistic categories of nouns and predicates. An analysis of the results reported in this study show an age effect throughout the entire sample. Across all the age groups, the comprehension of the noun and predicate subtests was better performed than the production of noun and predicate subtests. With regard to lexical items, the responses of children showed an influence of various factors, including the late acquisition of items, possible problems with stimuli presented to them, and the possible input received by the children from their home environment.

No abstract available.

This chapter reports on a cross-linguistic developmental study comparing speech and gesture produced in narratives by adults and children speaking either French (a non-pro-drop Romance language) or Zulu (a pro-drop Bantu language). We asked 72 participants (French: 12 adults and 24 children; Zulu: 12 adults and 24 children) to narrate a short silent cartoon. Zulu narratives were more detailed and contained fewer comments than the French. Zulu-speaking participants produced more representational and fewer pragmatic gestures than their French-speaking counterparts. Language differences do not explain this result. Rather, the findings support the gesture-speech co-expressivity framework and suggest an impact of literacy practice norms on multimodal narrative performance during later language acquisition.