Learning to express causal events in Mandarin Chinese: A multimodal perspective

Abstract

Previous research has shown language-specific features play a guiding role in how children develop expression of events with speech and gestures. This study adopts a multimodal approach and examines Mandarin Chinese, a language that features context use and verb serializations. Forty children (four-to-seven years old) and ten adults were asked to describe fourteen video stimuli depicting different types of causal events involving location/state changes. Participants’ speech was segmented into clauses and co-occurring gestures were analyzed in relation to causation. The results show that the older the children, the greater the use of contextual clauses which contribute meaning to event descriptions. It is not until the age of six that children used adult-like structures – namely, using single gestures representing causing actions and aligning them with verb serializations in single clauses. We discuss the implications of these findings for the guiding role of language specificity in multimodal language development.

Multimodal encoding of motion events in speech, gesture and cognition

“…Finally, empirical investigations of Talmy's (2000) typology of event integration that considers the multimodal nature of language is primarily in the domain of spontaneous motion events. There is also growing evidence on caused motion events (Furman et al, 2014;Niu et al, 2022). Future research should investigate whether the empirical conclusions drawn based on the current lines of work generalize to other classes of events included in Talmy's event integration framework, such as change of state events and caused motion events, as well as other core schematic features, such as the temporal contours of the event.…”

“…One study by Brown and Chen (2013) has shown that speakers of Mandarin Chinese frequently encoded manner in speech but did not tend to gestures that highlight manner and instead encode path in gestures (though this study did not focus on the expression of path in speech). However, evidence from co-speech gestures accompanying descriptions of other types of events shows that serial verb constructions tend to co-occur with single rather than multiple gestures (Defina, 2016;Niu et al, 2022). It remains to be seen how the factors discussed above such as type of manner or sensory modality shape motion event descriptions in equipollently-framed across spoken and gestural modalities.…”

“…Some findings indicate language specificity in speech and gesture around the same time (Özçalışkan, 2007; Özçalışkan et al, 2023), and some findings suggest that language-specific patterns develop later in gesture than in speech (Özyürek et al, 2008). Furthermore, the relation between speech and gesture may change throughout development, since children are typically more likely to express non-redundant information in co-speech gestures, for example, when describing caused motion events (Furman et al, 2014;Niu et al, 2022). Thus, developmental work can provide novel insights into languagespecific influences on multimodal event descriptions in speech and gesture.…”