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Gesture and language in narratives and explanations: the effects of age and communicative activity on late multimodal discourse development*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 May 2012

ASELA REIG ALAMILLO ,
JEAN-MARC COLLETTA  and
MICHÈLE GUIDETTI
ASELA REIG ALAMILLO*
Affiliation:
Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos
JEAN-MARC COLLETTA
Affiliation:
Université de Grenoble
MICHÈLE GUIDETTI
Affiliation:
Université de Toulouse
*
Address for Correspondence: Asela Reig Alamillo, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos, Instituto de Ciencias de la Educación, Av. Universidad 1001, Col. Chamilpa, Cuernavaca, Morelos, C. P. 62209. Mexico. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article addresses the effect of communicative activity on the use of language and gesture by school-age children. The present study examined oral narratives and explanations produced by children aged six and ten years on the basis of several linguistic and gestural measures. Results showed that age affects both gestural and linguistic behaviour, supporting previous findings that multimodal discourse continues to develop during the school-age years. The task (narration vs. explanation) also had clear effects on the use of language and gesture: gestures and subordinate markers were more frequent in explanations than in narratives, whereas cohesion markers were more often used in narratives. Altogether, these results show partly distinctive developmental patterns between narrative monologic discourse behaviour and explanatory behaviour in the context of dialogue and question–answer exchanges.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , June 2013 , pp. 511 - 538
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by grant no. 0178-01 from the ANR (French National Research Agency) project entitled ‘L'acquisition et les troubles du langage au regard de la multimodalité de la communication parlée’. We are grateful to Isabelle Rousset from Lidilem, and to all the children and adult students who took part in this study.

References

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