International audienceAs children’s language abilities develop, so may their use of co-speech gesture. We tested this hypothesis by studying oral narratives produced by French children and adults. One hundred and twenty-two participants, divided into three age groups (6years old, 10years old and adults), were asked to watch a Tom and Jerry cartoon and then tell the story to the experimenter. All narratives were videotaped, and subsequently transcribed and annotated for language and gesture using the ELAN software. The results showed a strong effect of age on language complexity, discourse construction and gesture. The age effect was only partly related to the length of the narratives, as adults produced shorter narratives than 10-year-olds. The study thus confirms that co-speech gestures develop with age in the context of narrative activity and plays a crucial role in discourse cohesion and the framing of verbal utterances. This developmental shift towards more complex narratives through both words and gestures is discussed in terms of its theoretical implications in the study of gesture and discourse development

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.

This study addresses two questions. The first question is about how children integrate linguistic, prosodic and kinesic resources into organised discourse behaviour such as oral narratives. Three event reports produced spontaneously by 9- to 11-year-old French children during interviews with an adult were extracted from a video corpus. A detailed analysis of these on four dimensions (discourse construction, voice and prosody, co-speech gestures and facial expressions, gaze direction) reveals a remarkable ability in children of this age to use prosodic and kinesic resources to frame and structure their narrative, to dramatise and enliven the recounted events, and to comment on them or on the narration. The second question stresses the developmental aspect of multimodal narrative behaviour. 32 event reports extracted from the same corpus and produced by French children aged from 6 to 11 years were analysed in a similar way and rated by two independent coders. This second study leads us to distinguish between three levels of narrative performance which appear to coincide by age. The multimodal study of oral narratives thus shows how and when children gradually become genuine narrators.

This article addresses the effect of communicative activity on the use of language and gesture by school-age children. The present study examined oral narratives and explanations produced by children aged six and ten years on the basis of several linguistic and gestural measures. Results showed that age affects both gestural and linguistic behaviour, supporting previous findings that multimodal discourse continues to develop during the school-age years. The task (narration vs. explanation) also had clear effects on the use of language and gesture: gestures and subordinate markers were more frequent in explanations than in narratives, whereas cohesion markers were more often used in narratives. Altogether, these results show partly distinctive developmental patterns between narrative monologic discourse behaviour and explanatory behaviour in the context of dialogue and question-answer exchanges.