Observing storytellers who use rhythmic beat gestures improves children’s narrative discourse performance.

Abstract

Bel and Dr. Wolfram Hinzen for their comments, and also to the Prosodic Studies Group in Barcelona. Special thanks to Joan Borràs-Comes for helping with the statistical analyses and to Judith Llanes-Coromina for helping with data collection. Many thanks also go to Clara Nogué and Anna Reixach who performed our stimulus recordings. We would like to thank all the audiovisual technicians at Universitat Pompeu Fabra for helping us with recording and editing. This study was approved by the ethics committee of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and has been funded by a research grant awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FFI2015-66533-P "Intonational and gestural meaning in language") and by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014 SGR_925) to the Prosodic Studies Group. The first author also acknowledges an FI grant from the Generalitat de Catalunya (ref. 2017FI_B_00297).

Encouraging kids to beat: Children's beat gesture production boosts their narrative performance

“…Both storytellers were monitored for to make sure that they consistently synchronized beat gestures and the corresponding target verbalizations. After recordings were completed, the first author F I G U R E 1 Still images showing one of the two storytellers performing an outward beat gesture hand movement (left panel) and an inward beat gesture hand movement (right panel) in one of the training videos also checked the results to ensure that the use of gestures appeared to be natural (the videos were the same as the ones used in the beat gesture condition in Vilà-Giménez et al, 2019).…”

“…For the overall narrative structure scores of the pretest and posttest narratives, we used the same narrative assessment-coding scheme F I G U R E 3 Still images of children performing posttest narratives after being exposed to the beat non-encouraging condition (left panel) and the beat encouraging condition (right panel) as in Vilà-Giménez et al (2019), which was adapted from Demir et al (2014) and . Four main features were considered when analysing the structure of each story, yielding a score between 0 and 6: (a) the presence of an animate protagonist, (b) its temporal structure, (c) its causal structure and (d) the presence of a goal-directed action (i.e.…”

Prosody in the Auditory and Visual Domains: A Developmental Perspective

“…In narrations, children seem to gesture more when they produce longer sentences with more connectives ( Nicoladis et al, 1999 ; Graziano, 2011 , 2014 ; Colletta et al, 2014 ), and they use different gesture types depending on the age and the type of discourse they produce ( Alamillo et al, 2013 ). Also, they display better narrative skills in a story retelling game if they have had access to manual beat gestures marking information focus and event boundaries ( Vilà-Giménez et al, 2017 ). On the speech prosody side, children at age five and six are found to use the appropriate pitch accents with the right alignment to signal new information in the discourse (see Chen, 2018 for a review), and in narratives they mark event boundaries through pitch direction and linearity ( Kallay and Redford, 2016 ).…”

Hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned words improves L2 pronunciation: Evidence from Catalan and Chinese learners of French

“…In order to take into account individual differences, prior to the experiment, a series of control tests were carried out for each participant during a separate session that lasted around 40 minutes. In this session measures were taken of a) short-term memory through a memory span task with lists of Catalan words [12], b) narrative ability through a story retelling task involving a short cartoon [13], c) imitation skills through an elicited imitation task involving 12 words in six different languages, d) perceptual abilities through a phonological discrimination task with nonwords [14], e) perceptual rhythmic abilities through a standard musical rhythm and accent perception test [15], and f) a rhythm hand-clapping replication test with six rhythmic samples (4/4 meter, 2 measures).…”