Gesture and language in narratives and explanations: the effects of age and communicative activity on late multimodal discourse development

Abstract

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.

Gesture as simulated action: Revisiting the framework

“…Relatively few studies have directly compared gesture production in children and adults. The available data are based mainly on cartoon-retell tasks, and they suggest that children gesture at lower rates than adults on such tasks (Alibali et al, 2009;Colletta, Pellenq, & Guidetti, 2010;Mayberry, Jacques, & DeDe, 1998;Reig Alamillo, Colletta, & Guidetti, 2012). At first glance, this seems potentially inconsistent with the idea that gestures should be more prevalent with rich imagistic simulations, because there is no reason to assume that children would rely less on visuospatial representations than adults.…”

“…If inhibitory control is needed to prevent highly activated simulations from being expressed as gestures, as the GSA framework contends, then children should gesture more than adults, all else being equal. The problem, of course, is that all else is not equal, as there are also developmental differences in narrative length and complexity (e.g., Colletta et al, 2010;Reig Alamillo et al, 2012), in imagery abilities (e.g., Spruijt et al, 2015), in sensitivity to the audience's knowledge (e.g., Fukumura, 2016), and in other verbal skills across development. Thus, it is difficult to use the GSA framework to interpret differences in gesture rates between children and adults, because so many factors that are proposed to affect gesture rates also change with development.…”

Zulu oral narrative development from a speech and gesture perspective

“…Findings from the above study show that the narrative ability develops with age (Colletta, Pellenq andGuidetti, 2010, ReigAlamillo, Colletta andGuidetti, 2013) and that by the age of 10 years, a child is still far from giving a narrative production as rich and complex as an adult. This study looked at two children cohorts (6 years and 10 years) and adults of the above-listed languages.…”

The relationship between character viewpoint gesture and narrative structure in children

“…With age, the nature of children's iconic gestures changes. Younger children produce more CVPT gestures than adults, and fewer dual viewpoint gestures (McNeill, 1992) than adults (Reig Alamillo, Colletta, & Guidetti, 2013). With age, CVPT gestures decrease, and OVPT and dual viewpoint gestures increase.…”