Chapter 7
Gesture and speech in adults’ and children’s narratives
A cross-linguistic investigation of Zulu and French
Jean-Marc Colletta | Laboratoire Linguistique et Didactique des Langues Etrangères et Maternelles, Université Grenoble Alpes
Michèle Guidetti | Laboratoire Cognition, Langues, Langage, Ergonomie, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès & CNRS
This chapter reports on a cross-linguistic developmental study comparing speech and gesture produced in narratives by adults and children speaking either French (a non-pro-drop Romance language) or Zulu (a pro-drop Bantu language). We asked 72 participants (French: 12 adults and 24 children; Zulu: 12 adults and 24 children) to narrate a short silent cartoon. Zulu narratives were more detailed and contained fewer comments than the French. Zulu-speaking participants produced more representational and fewer pragmatic gestures than their French-speaking counterparts. Language differences do not explain this result. Rather, the findings support the gesture-speech co-expressivity framework and suggest an impact of literacy practice norms on multimodal narrative performance during later language acquisition.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 1.1The role of gesture in the development of multimodal communication
- 1.2The role of language-specific factors in the development of multimodal communication
- 1.3Aims of the present investigation
- 2.Method
- 2.1Participants
- 2.2Procedure
- 2.3Coding
- 2.3.1Speech coding
- 2.3.2Discourse cohesive clues
- 2.3.3Gesture coding
- 2.3.4Rates per clause
- 2.3.5Reliability
- 3.Results
- 3.1Effects of language and age on linguistic measures
- 3.2Effects of language and age on gestural measures
- 3.3The role of gesture in tracking referents in Zulu narratives
- 4.Discussion
- 4.1Effects of language on narratives
- 4.2Effects of language on gestures
- 4.3Effects of age on narratives
- 4.4Effects of age on gesture
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Acknowledgements
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Notes
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References