Children are known to use different types of referential gestures (e.g., deictic, iconic) from a very young age. In contrast, their use of non-referential gestures is not well established. This study investigated the use of stroke-defined non-referential ‘beat’ gestures in a story-retelling and an exposition task by twelve 6-year-olds, an age at which proficiency in discourse is beginning to develop. The goals of the study were to (1) establish if children this age use stroke-defined beats, (2) determine whether the two discourse types influence the incidence of stroke-defined beats, and (3) examine the extent to which stroke-defined beats co-occur with lexical words or pitch accents. The results showed that nine of the children produced at least one beat gesture with a well-defined stroke phase, and that the frequency of the stroke-defined beat gesture use did not differ significantly between the two tasks. Stroke-defined beats occurred more often on lexical words than function words, but they did not co-occur more often with a pitch accent, suggesting its potential link with pitch accents for emphasis. This study therefore provides support for children’s ‘prosodic’ use of gesture – a function which may become more common as discourse abilities develop.
AlamilloA. R.CollettaJ. M.GuidettiM. (2013). Gesture and language in narratives and explanations: The effects of age and communicative activity on late multimodal discourse development. Journal of Child Language, 40, 511–538.
2.
AlibaliM. W.EvansJ. L.HostetterA. B.RyanK.Mainela-ArnoldE. (2009). Gesture–speech integration in narrative discourse: Are children less redundant than adults?Gesture, 9, 290–311.
3.
BatesE.BenigniL.BrethertonI.CamaioniL.VolterraV. (1979). The emergence of symbols: Cognition and communication in infancy. New York, NY: Academic Press.
4.
BermanR. A.Nir-SagivB. (2007). Comparing narrative and expository text construction across adolescence: A developmental paradox. Discourse Processes, 43, 79–120.
5.
BlakeJ.MyszczyszynD.JokelA.BebirogluN. (2008). Gestures accompanying speech in specifically language-impaired children and their timing with speech. First Language, 28, 237–253.
6.
BoersmaP.WeeninkD. (2014). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer (Version 5.3.84) [Computer software]. Available from http://www.praat.org/
7.
BolingerD. L. (1958). A theory of pitch accent in English. Word, 14, 109–149.
8.
ButcherC.Goldin-MeadowS. (2000). Gesture and the transition from one- to two-word speech: When hand and mouth come together. In McNeillD. (Ed.), Language and gesture (pp. 235–257). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
9.
CollettaJ. M.GuidettiM.CapriciO.CristilliC.DemirO. E.Kunene-NicolasR. N.LevineS. (2015). Effects of age and language on co-speech gesture production: An investigation of French, American, and Italian children’s narratives. Journal of Child Language, 42, 122–145.
10.
CollettaJ. M.PellenqC. (2009). Multimodal explanations in French children aged 3 to 11 years. In NippoldN.ScottC. (Eds.), Expository discourse development and disorders: International perspectives (pp. 63–97). New York, NY: Taylor & Francis.
11.
CollettaJ. M.PellenqC.GuidettiM. (2010). Age-related changes in co-speech gesture and narrative: Evidence from French children and adults. Speech Communication, 52, 565–576.
12.
de BotK.SchraufJ. (2009). Language development over the lifespan. New York, NY: Routledge.
13.
EisenbergA. (1985). Learning to describe past experiences in conversation. Discourse Processes, 8, 177–204.
14.
EkmanP.FriesenW. V. (1972). Hand movements. Journal of Communication, 22, 353–374.
15.
Goldin-MeadowS. (2000). Beyond words: The importance of gesture to researchers and learners. Child Development, 71, 231–239.
16.
HicksD. (1990). Genre skills and narrative development in the elementary school years. Linguistics and Education, 2, 43–73.
17.
IgualadaA.Esteve-GibertN.PrietoP. (2017). Beat gestures improve word recall in 3- to 5-year-old children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 156, 99–112.
18.
IversonJ. M.CapriciO.CaselliM. C. (1994). From communication to language in two modalities. Cognitive Development, 9, 23–43.
19.
KendonA. (1996). An agenda for gesture studies. The Semiotic Review of Books, 8, 121–131.
20.
KendonA. (2004). Gesture: Visible action as utterance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
21.
KitaS.ÖzyürekA. (2003). What does cross-linguistic variation in semantic coordination of speech and gesture reveal?: Evidence for an interface representation of spatial thinking and speaking. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 16–32.
22.
KrahmerE. J.SwertsM. G. J. (2007). The effects of visual beats on prosodic prominence: Acoustic analyses, auditory perception and visual perception. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 396–414.
23.
LausbergH.SloetjesH. (2009). Coding gestural behavior with the NEUROGES-ELAN system. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 41, 841–849.
24.
LeonardT.CumminsF. (2011). The temporal relation between beat gestures and speech. Language and Cognitive Processes, 26, 1457–1471.
LoehrD. (2012). Temporal, structural, and pragmatic synchrony between intonation and gesture. Laboratory Phonology, 3, 71–89.
27.
MarshallC. R.MorganG. (2015). From gesture to sign language: Conventionalization of classifier constructions by adult hearing learners of British Sign Language. Topics in Cognitive Science, 7, 61–80.
28.
MayberryR. I.NicoladisE. (2000). Gesture reflects language development: Evidence from bilingual children. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9, 192–196.
29.
McCabeA.BlissL. (2003). Patterns of narrative discourse: A multicultural, life span approach. New York, NY: Pearson Education.
McNeillD. (1985). So you think gestures are nonverbal?Psychological Review, 92, 350–371.
32.
McNeillD. (1992). Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
33.
McNeillD. (2005). Gesture and thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
34.
MillerP.SperryL. (1988). Early talk about past: The origins of conversational stories of personal experience. Journal of Child Language, 15, 293–315.
35.
MosenthalP. B. (1985). Defining the expository discourse continuum. Poetics, 14, 387–414.
36.
NelsonK. (1978). How children represent knowledge of their world in and out of language: A preliminary report. In SieglerR. S. (Ed.), Children’s thinking: What develops? (pp. 255–273). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
37.
NicoladisE.MayberryR.GeneseeF. (1999). Gesture and early bilingual development. Developmental Psychology, 35, 514–526.
38.
NicolasR. M.GuidettiM.CollettaJ. M. (2017). A cross-linguistic study of the development of gesture and speech in Zulu and French oral narratives. Journal of Child Language, 44, 36–62.
39.
NovackM. A.CongdonE. L.Hemani-LopezN.Goldin-MeadowS. (2014). From action to abstraction using the hands to learn math. Psychological Science, 25, 903–910.
40.
ÖzçalışkanS.Goldin-MeadowS. (2005). Gesture is the cutting edge of early development. Cognition, 96, 101–113.
41.
RiseboroughM. G. (1982). Meaning in movement: An investigation into the interrelationship of physiographic gestures and speech in seven-year-olds. British Journal of Psychology, 73, 497–503.
42.
RoweM. L.Goldin-MeadowS. (2009). Early gesture selectively predicts later language learning. Developmental Science, 12, 182–187.
43.
RusiewiczH. L.ShaimanS.IversonJ. M.SzuminskyN. (2013). Effects of prosody and position on the timing of deictic gestures. Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, 56, 458–470.
44.
RusiewiczH. L.ShaimanS.IversonJ. M.SzuminskyN. (2014). Effects of perturbation and prosody on the coordination of speech and gesture. Speech Communication, 57, 283–300.
45.
VenezianoE.SinclairH. (1995). Functional changes in early child language: The appearance of references to the past and of explanations. Journal of Child Language, 22, 557–581.
46.
WellsB.PeppéS.GoulandrisN. (2004). Intonation development from five to thirteen. Journal of Child Language, 31, 749–778.
47.
YasinikY.RenwickM.Shattuck-HufnagelS. (2004). The timing of speech-accompanying gesture with respect to prosody. Proceedings of the International Conference: From sound to sense (pp. 97–102). Cambridge, MA: MIT.
