Abstract
The development of body movements such as hand or head gestures, or facial expressions, seems to go hand-in-hand with the development of speech abilities. We know that very young infants rely on the movements of their caregivers’ mouth to segment the speech stream, that infants’ canonical babbling is temporally related to rhythmic hand movements, that narrative abilities emerge at a similar time in speech and gestures, and that children make use of both modalities to access complex pragmatic intentions. Prosody has emerged as a key linguistic component in this speech-gesture relationship, yet its exact role in the development of multimodal communication is still not well understood. For example, it is not clear what the relative weights of speech prosody and body gestures are in language acquisition, or whether both modalities develop at the same time or whether one modality needs to be in place for the other to emerge. The present paper reviews existing literature on the interactions between speech prosody and body movements from a developmental perspective in order to shed some light on these issues.
Highlights
Human language is an interesting input as it can be perceived through both ears and eyes
Gestures can be defined on the basis of the articulator that is being used to produce them, on the basis of whether or not they are accompanied by speech, or based on whether the gesture movement is continuous or discrete
In the present paper we will refer to these different types of movements as ‘gestures,’ as we propose that it is more interesting to take them as a whole to have a complete picture of the speech-gesture relationship in language and communication development
Summary
Human language is an interesting input as it can be perceived through both ears and eyes. It has been shown that 8-month-old infants reliably detect congruence between matching auditory and visual displays of a talking face based on prosodic motion (Kitamura et al, 2014), and that 9-month-olds can detect whether a manual deictic gesture is congruently aligned with the corresponding speech segment (Esteve-Gibert et al, 2015).
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