Pantomime (Not Silent Gesture) in Multimodal Communication: Evidence From Children’s Narratives

Paula Marentette,Elena Nicoladis,Marcus E Suvanto,Reyhan Furman

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.575952

Paula Marentette, Elena Nicoladis + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.575952

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Abstract

Pantomime has long been considered distinct from co-speech gesture. It has therefore been argued that pantomime cannot be part of gesture-speech integration. We examine pantomime as distinct from silent gesture, focusing on non-co-speech gestures that occur in the midst of children’s spoken narratives. We propose that gestures with features of pantomime are an infrequent but meaningful component of a multimodal communicative strategy. We examined spontaneous non-co-speech representational gesture production in the narratives of 30 monolingual English-speaking children between the ages of 8- and 11-years. We compared the use of co-speech and non-co-speech gestures in both autobiographical and fictional narratives and examined viewpoint and the use of non-manual articulators, as well as the length of responses and narrative quality. The use of non-co-speech gestures was associated with longer narratives of equal or higher quality than those using only co-speech gestures. Non-co-speech gestures were most likely to adopt character-viewpoint and use non-manual articulators. The present study supports a deeper understanding of the term pantomime and its multimodal use by children in the integration of speech and gesture.

Highlights

Both pantomime and co-speech gesture refer to bodily movements used in communication (McNeill, 1992)
We argue for a distinction between two types of non-co-speech gesture: (a) silent gesture, which arises from tasks requiring communication without speech, and (b) pantomime, which, like co-speech gesture, forms a natural part of multimodal communication
We address whether or not pantomime as a term can be extended to the non-co-speech gestures of the children in the present study

Summary

Introduction

Both pantomime and co-speech gesture refer to bodily movements used in communication (McNeill, 1992). We examine representational gesture produced with and without speech in the narratives of 8–11-year-old children. We use these data to question whether there are distributional differences between spontaneously produced co-speech and non-co-speech gestures. We use the term non-co-speech gesture to include all gestures produced without simultaneous speech. The terms pantomime and non-co-speech are used as they are employed by researchers when reviewing the literature. We address whether or not pantomime as a term can be extended to the non-co-speech gestures of the children in the present study

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