Children Use Non-referential Gestures in Narrative Speech to Mark Discourse Elements Which Update Common Ground.

Patrick Louis Rohrer,Pilar Prieto,Ingrid Vilà-Giménez,Júlia Florit-Pons

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661339

Abstract

While recent studies have claimed that non-referential gestures (i.e., gestures that do not visually represent any semantic content in speech) are used to mark discourse-new and/or -accessible referents and focused information in adult speech, to our knowledge, no prior investigation has studied the relationship between information structure (IS) and gesture referentiality in children’s narrative speech from a developmental perspective. A longitudinal database consisting of 332 narratives performed by 83 children at two different time points in development was coded for IS and gesture referentiality (i.e., referential and non-referential gestures). Results revealed that at both time points, both referential and non-referential gestures were produced more with information that moves discourse forward (i.e., focus) and predication (i.e., comment) rather than topical or background information. Further, at 7–9 years of age, children tended to use more non-referential gestures to mark focus and comment constituents than referential gestures. In terms of the marking of the newness of discourse referents, non-referential gestures already seem to play a key role at 5–6 years old, whereas referential gestures did not show any patterns. This relationship was even stronger at 7–9 years old. All in all, our findings offer supporting evidence that in contrast with referential gestures, non-referential gestures have been found to play a key role in marking IS, and that the development of this relationship solidifies at a period in development that coincides with a spurt in non-referential gesture production.

Highlights

In face-to-face communication, people naturally use gestures while speaking
The present paper focuses on the multimodal development of children’s narrative discourse by asking how both referential and non-referential gestures are related to information structure (IS)-marking1
The current study describes the results of a longitudinal investigation of children’s development of multimodal ISmarking by focusing on the analysis of children’s narrative speech at two time points in development

Summary

Introduction

In face-to-face communication, people naturally use gestures while speaking. Co-speech gestures have been defined as visible actions made by bodily movements (hands, head movements, among others) that act as an utterance or a part of an utterance and co-occur with speech (Kendon, 2004; see Wagner et al, 2014, for a review). Referential gestures can be iconic or metaphoric in nature through using “pictorial” hand shapes or movements to describe concrete or abstract entities and actions described in speech, or deictic in nature through locating concrete or abstract entities in space These gestures clearly and directly represent the semantic content of speech, adding to the propositional meaning of the utterance. These gestures can have more complex gesture phasing, forms, and tend to have discursive and pragmatic functions (ShattuckHufnagel et al, 2016; Prieto et al, 2018; Shattuck-Hufnagel and Prieto, 2019; Rohrer et al, 2020; among others) We consider these gestures as non-referential in nature as they do not portray any semantic meaning in speech (via iconicity, metaphoricity, or deixis) through its hand shape or trajectory movement.

Methods

Results

Conclusion