Article published in:
The gesture–sign interface in language acquisition / L’interface geste–signe dans l’acquisition du langage
Edited by Aliyah Morgenstern and Michèle Guidetti
[Language, Interaction and Acquisition 8:1] 2017
► pp. 89–116

Developing communicative postures

The emergence of shrugging in child communication

| Sorbonne Nouvelle University
| Paris Nanterre University
This article analyses the development of a composite communicative posture, the shrug (which can combine palm-up flips, lifted shoulders and a head tilt), in a video corpus of spontaneous interactions between a typically developing British girl, Ellie, and her mother, filmed at home one hour each month from Ellie’s tenth month to her fourth birthday. The systematic coding of every shrug yields a total of 124 tokens (Ellie: 98; her mother: 26), providing results in terms of forms, functions and input. Ellie’s first shrug components emerge from non-linguistic actions and she acquires them one at a time starting with the hands: these features recall the development of complex signs among deaf children of the same age (Reilly & Anderson, 2002 for ASL). The functions of Ellie’s shrugs gradually diversify from the expression of absence at 1;04 to other epistemic and non-epistemic meanings (affective and dynamic). Adult intervention plays a crucial role as adults recurrently equate Ellie’s physical movements with speech, thereby contributing to the emergence of their communicative functions as gestural emblems (Ekman & Friesen, 1969).
Keywords: shrug, multimodality, gesture development, gesture compositionality, gestural emblems, first language acquisition, embodied interaction.
Published online: 16 October 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/lia.8.1.05bea
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Clift, Rebecca
2020. Stability and visibility in embodiment: The ‘Palm Up’ in interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 169 ► pp. 190 ff. Crossref logo
Cooperrider, Kensy, Natasha Abner & Susan Goldin-Meadow
2018. The Palm-Up Puzzle: Meanings and Origins of a Widespread Form in Gesture and Sign. Frontiers in Communication 3 Crossref logo

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