Egg and Jerry

Giulia Capussotti,Chiara Meluzzi

doi:10.20396/joss.v9i00.14968

Abstract

In this paper we present a sociolinguistic research conducted on Italian schoolchildren learning English as LS. Following on from renowned researchers, we focused on a less studied population, that is school-aged monolingual children. Our participants consist in 15 students of a 4th grade class at a primary school in Pavia, all aged around 9 y.o, 7 boys and 8 girls. All children do not present any recorded cognitive problems and they are all Italian L1 speakers with little or no use of other languages at home, and English learnt as LS since the beginning of primary school at age 6. We recorded all children performing a task of re-narration of a “Tom & Jerry” cartoon, firstly in Italian and then, after one week, in English. The corpus consist of about 2h 45’ of recordings, transcribed and annotated in ELAN. Lexical knowledge in English was also tested through a questionnaire before the recordings. The results were analyzed both qualitatively and, partly, quantitatively. During qualitative analysis, two elements were observed: (1) general tendencies in speakers general behavior and (2) differences in the relationship between syntactic-conversational system and gesture system in relation to L1/L2. The quantitative analysis show a difference in the use of beats gestures and iconic ones between L1 and LS, but also between boys and girls.

Highlights

The co-occurrence of gesture and speech has been widely studied in connection with a baby‟s linguistic development, and in the fields of language impairment and bilingual studies
We investigated the quantity of hand gestures in both L1 and L2 recordings, by highlighting whether this difference assumes statistical significance with respect to variables of gesture and language, and pupils‟ sex
This article fits into the scientific fieldwork of Gesture Studies and presents the investigation of speech-gesture relation within a fourth-grade class of 15 pupils

Summary

Introduction

The co-occurrence of gesture and speech has been widely studied in connection with a baby‟s linguistic development, and in the fields of language impairment and bilingual studies. Results are not always similar between one language and the other, and there is a substantial lack of knowledge of certain age groups - in particular in relation to the comparison between L1 and a possible L2. For this reason, in this paper we wanted to provide a first insight on narration and gesture in the production of a group of 15 Italian pupils of 9 years of age, video-recorded while performing narrations and short dialogical sequences in both Italian L1 and English L2. The pupils‟ sex was considered, since, as already pointed out in the literature, girls and boys behaved differently, in both L1 and L2 tasks (e.g., Coates, 2015 for a review)

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