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.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The shrug: a composite posture
    • 1.2Background: the adult study
  • 2.The child study: corpus and method
  • 3.Quantitative results
    • 3.1Use of forms
    • 3.2Functions of shrugs
    • 3.3Form-function patterns? Exploratory statistics
  • 4.Qualitative analysis: multimodal wholes
    • 4.1Palm-up + “done” or “gone”
    • 4.2Palm-up + “where…?”
    • 4.3Lateral head tilt + “I don’t know” or “I can’t remember”
    • 4.4After 3;03: more complex multimodal utterances
  • 5.The role of the input
    • 5.1The input as model
    • 5.2Adult speech about the child’s gestures
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 October 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/lia.8.1.05bea
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