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Sources of Variation in First Language Acquisition: Languages, contexts, and learners
Edited by Maya Hickmann †, Edy Veneziano and Harriet Jisa
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 22] 2018
► pp. 139–160

Chapter 7
Gesture and speech in adults’ and children’s narratives

A cross-linguistic investigation of Zulu and French

| Laboratoire Linguistique et Didactique des Langues Etrangères et Maternelles, Université Grenoble Alpes
| Department of Linguistics, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa
| 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.

Keywords: multimodality, development, narratives, Zulu, French, gesture-speech co-expressivity
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
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.22.08col
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