Abstract
Children might combine gesture and prosody to express a pragmatic meaning such as a request, information focus, uncertainty or politeness, before they can convey these meanings in speech. However, little is known about the developmental trajectories of gestural and prosodic patterns and how they relate to a child’s growing understanding and propositional use of these sociopragmatic meanings. Do gesture and prosody act as sister systems in pragmatic development? Do children acquire these components of language before they are able to express themselves through spoken language, thus acting as forerunners in children’s pragmatic development? This review article assesses empirical evidence that demonstrates that gesture and prosody act as intimately related systems and, importantly, pave the way for pragmatic acquisition at different developmental stages. The review goes on to explore how the integration of gesture and prosody with semantics and syntax can impact language acquisition and how multimodal interventions can be used effectively in educational settings. Our review findings support the importance of simultaneously assessing both the prosodic and the gestural components of language in the fields of language development, language learning, and language intervention.
Highlights
Human face-to-face interaction is essentially multimodal and constitutes an organized combination of gesture and speech patterns that jointly convey relevant meanings
Following Snow (2017), we suggest that intonation and gesture act as sister systems in the signaling of information focus in protodeclarative sentences used by infants between 8 and 16 months
The results reviewed suggest that prelexical children already have considerable knowledge of information focus deriving from a combination of prosodic and gestural features
Summary
Human face-to-face interaction is essentially multimodal and constitutes an organized combination of gesture and speech patterns that jointly convey relevant meanings. Kelly et al (2010) showed how congruent combinations of iconic gestures and speech, expressed in lexical items (for example, Children’s Multimodal Sociopragmatic Development saying “chop” while making a chopping hand gesture), as opposed to incongruent combinations of gesture and speech, are integrated through mutual and necessarily bidirectional interactions during language comprehension. Several studies have highlighted the fact that prominent positions, as well as prosodic boundaries, shape gestural coordination patterns and speech planning processes, revealing that prosodic structure acts as an anchoring structure for gesture movements (Esteve-Gibert and Prieto, 2013; Krivokapiæ, 2014; Esteve-Gibert et al, 2017; Graziano and Gullberg, 2018)
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