Do French–English Bilingual Children Gesture More Than Monolingual Children?

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that bilingual adults use more gestures than English monolinguals. Because no study has compared the gestures of bilinguals and monolinguals in both languages, the high gesture rate could be due to transfer from a high gesture language or could result from the use of gesture to aid in linguistic access. In this study we tried to distinguish between those causes by comparing the gesture rate of 10 French-English bilingual preschoolers with both 10 French and 10 English monolinguals. All were between 4 and 6 years of age. The children were asked to watch a cartoon and tell the story back. The results showed the bilingual children gestured more than either group of monolinguals and at the same rate in both French and English. These results suggest that that the bilinguals were not gesturing because they were transferring the high gesture rate from one language to another. We argue that bilinguals might gesture more than monolinguals to help formulate their spoken message.

Language contact does not drive gesture transfer: Heritage speakers maintain language specific gesture patterns in each language

“…It is possible that deictic gestures helped bilinguals organize discourse (Gullberg, 1998; and package their message more easily by means of locating characters, objects and action in gesture space (Nicoladis, 2006(Nicoladis, , 2007, therefore reducing the cognitive load by externalizing the characters on to gesture space. Even though we found an increase in the deictic gesture rate in bilinguals, we did not find differences between bilingual and monolingual speakers with regard to iconic gesture rate unlike some previous studies (Nicoladis et al, 2009). It has been previously suggested that iconic gestures may emerge when speakers are trying to be particularly detailed or imagistic (Alibali et al, 2000) and may be used to mediate difficult speech for the listener (Beattie & Shovelton, 2000;Sherman & Nicoladis, 2004).…”

“…Therefore, it is also possible that bilinguals might have gestured more than monolinguals overall rather than transferring gesture rate. Such a trend was indeed shown by Nicoladis et al (2009) who found no evidence for gesture rate transfer for English-French bilingual children in Canada even though bilingual children tended to use more iconic gestures than monolingual comparison groups while speaking in both English and French. The authors suggested that bilinguals have more "choices" for how to package verbal messages compared to monolinguals, and bilinguals may gesture more than monolinguals which will help them hold information in memory while they search for how to package their message.…”

“…Bilingual speakers in this study have high proficiency in both Turkish and Dutch and use both languages regularly. Thus, gestures used by this population can reveal some insights about whether a) the gestures of the minority language adapt to those of the majority language or b) bilingual speakers maintain the language-specific gesture rates as they are proficient users in each language , and/or c) some cognitive factors such as the possible cognitive cost of inhibiting the task-irrelevant language can explain gesture use as bilinguals may exploit iconic and/or deictic gestures to help organize their speech and to help reduce cognitive load (Nicoladis, 2006(Nicoladis, , 2007Nicoladis, Pika & Marentette, 2009).…”

How Referential Gestures Align With Speech: Evidence From Monolingual and Bilingual Speakers

“…L2 and bilingual research has shown that L2 learners do make use of gestures (and generally at a higher rate than monolinguals) in order to resolve different kinds of shortcomings, including lexical problems, grammatical difficulties, and lack of fluency in the weaker language (e.g., Gullberg, , ). Gesture use has also been seen as a way to activate items in the mental lexicon for bilinguals (e.g., Nicoladis, Pika, & Marentette, ; Nicoladis, Pika, Yin, & Marentette, ). However, these studies did not analyze the temporal alignment between the two modalities specifically in terms of synchrony as we did in our study; rather, they looked at whether there was a gesture or not.…”

Gesture as simulated action: Revisiting the framework

“…In support of this view, speakers gesture more in description tasks that are more cognitively demanding (e.g., Hostetter, Alibali, & Kita, 2007), and they gesture more when they are under extraneous cognitive load (e.g., Hoetjes & Masson-Carro, 2017). Moreover, there is evidence that speakers gesture more when ideas are difficult to describe, either because the ideas are not easily lexicalized in their language (e.g., Morsella & Krauss, 2004; but see de Ruiter et al, 2012), because the speakers are bilingual (e.g., Nicoladis, Pika, & Marentette, 2009), or because they have a brain injury (e.g., Göksun, Lehet, Malykhina, & Chatterjee, 2015;Kim, Stierwalt, LaPointe, & Bourgeois, 2015). Although task difficulty does not guarantee an increase in gesture rates-as there must first be an underlying imagistic simulation that is being described-the GSA framework contends that increased cognitive load can result in lower thresholds and higher gesture rates.…”