Article published in:
Verbal and gestural expression of motion and spatial events / L’expression verbale et gestuelle du mouvement et de l’espace: New evidence from different age groups and linguistic environments / nouveaux arguments en provenance de différents groupes d’âge et de différents environnements linguistiques
Edited by Kateřina Fibigerová, Jean-Marc Colletta and Michèle Guidetti
[Language, Interaction and Acquisition 9:1] 2018
► pp. 40–68

Gestural depiction of motion events in narrative increases symbolic distance with age

| Radboud University | Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
| University of Bristol
| University of Warwick
We examined gesture representation of motion events in narratives produced by three- and nine-year-olds, and adults. Two aspects of gestural depiction were analysed: how protagonists were depicted, and how gesture space was used. We found that older groups were more likely to express protagonists as an object that a gesturing hand held and manipulated, and less likely to express protagonists with whole-body enactment gestures. Furthermore, for older groups, gesture space increasingly became less similar to narrated space. The older groups were less likely to use large gestures or gestures in the periphery of the gesture space to represent movements that were large relative to a protagonist’s body or that took place next to a protagonist. They were also less likely to produce gestures on a physical surface (e.g. table) to represent movement on a surface in narrated events. The development of gestural depiction indicates that older speakers become less immersed in the story world and start to control and manipulate story representation from an outside perspective in a bounded and stage-like gesture space. We discuss this developmental shift in terms of increasing symbolic distancing (Werner & Kaplan, 1963).
Keywords: gesture, speech, motion events, distancing, preschool children
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The current study
  • 3.Method
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Data
    • 3.3Materials
    • 3.4Procedure
    • 3.5Coding
      • 3.5.1Speech segmentation
      • 3.5.2Gesture coding
    • 3.6Reliability
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Gestural depiction of protagonists when their location is in focus
    • 4.2Gestures showing how moving protagonists are depicted
    • 4.3Gestures in which gesture strokes made contact with the body or an object surface
    • 4.4Gestures made exclusively in outer gesture space
    • 4.5Gestures expressing the location ‘the top of the hill’ in the stimulus events
    • 4.6Gestures expressing the location ‘the bottom of the hill’ in the stimulus events
  • 5.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 09 May 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/lia.15020.sek
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