Coordination between vocalizations, gestures and prosody before the start of verbal communication: evidence from the Basque language / Coordinación entre vocalizaciones, gestos y prosodia antes del inicio de la comunicación verbal: evidencias desde la lengua vasca

Abstract

There is a major debate in the scholarly literature on whether early vocalizations imitate the mother tongue (L1) and whether prosody is an emerging feature of intentional communication. This longitudinal study explores the combinatory patterns of gestures and vocalizations of four Basque children aged 0:7 to 1:1 in the protoconversational stage. A total of 1,043 communicative acts were labelled (noting the kind of communication, the eye contact and the type of gestures), in which a total of 581 vocalizations were pragmatically and acoustically codified (marking the length and tonal range). The results showed that before they produce their first words, the children show a predominant pattern, tending to combine the deictic gestures with eye contact with the interlocutor. Furthermore, the children are capable of choosing specific prosodic signals — such as length and tonal range — to expression the intentionality of their vocalizations. This suggests that some prosodic features work as procedural antecedents in the process of constructing oral compositions.