Effects of age and language on co-speech gesture production: an investigation of French, American, and Italian children's narratives

Abstract

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.

The parallel development of the form and meaning of two-handed gestures and linguistic information packaging within a clause in narrative

“…Our second finding is in line with the gesture-speech parallel development view (Colletta et al, 2015;Gullberg & Narasimhan, 2010;Nicoladis, 2002). This is in contrast with the tradeoff view (Acredolo & Goodwyn, 1988;Church & Goldin-Meadow, 1986;Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005;Kidd & Holler, 2009).…”

“…In contrast, children and adults who used the two verbs to distinguish object positions produced gestures depicting the objects (as well as movement path). Finally, Colletta et al (2015) compared speech and gesture produced in a narrative task in 5-and 10-year-old French-, American-, and Italian-speaking children. The authors found that as the children became able to deliver longer and more detailed accounts of a story, they increased the use of co-speech gestures to represent and track the characters in the story.…”

“…The parallel relationship of gesture and speech has been demonstrated at different levels: the frequency of gesture and the complexity of sentences (Nicholadis, 2002), the segmentation of routes in speech and the size and number of gestures (Sekine, 2009), the representation of a moved object in gestures and placement verbs (Gullberg & Narasimhan, 2010), and reference tracking in gesture and speech (Colletta et al, 2015). However, no study has examined the development of two-handed gestures and information packaging in speech.…”

Properties of vocalization- and gesture-combinations in the transition to first words

“…Caselli, Rinaldi, Stefanini and Volterra (2012), studying children aged 0;8 to 1;6, found that it is after 1;4 that word production exceeds gesture production in children's communicative repertories. Gestures and speech remain strongly associated throughout the language development process, and the gesturalvocal system evolves, fulfilling new specific functions in later language learning (Colletta, Guidetti, Capirci, Cristilli, Demir, Kunene-Nicolas & Levine, 2014).…”

Zulu oral narrative development from a speech and gesture perspective

“…Literature on the communicative behaviour of young children from a multimodal perspective is steadily growing, for instance, for French (Colletta, 2004;Colletta et al, 2015;Guidetti, 2002, for Italian (Graziano, 2009 to name a few. However, little is known about how multimodal speech develops after two years.…”