The coordination of gestural, prosodic and verbal patterns: a developmental perspective on multimodal negation in French speaking children
Résumé
Through constant exposure to adult input, children’s language gradually develops into rich linguistic constructions that contain multiple cross-modal elements. Prosody and gesture in particular both facilitate children’s entry into language. Children not only demonstrate sensitivity to the intonation and rhythm of their native tongue from birth (Mehler et al., 1978; Jusczyck, 1998), but they also use the prosodic level to structure their first productions. Similarly, gestures play a crucial role in children’s entry into symbolic communication. Since the single-word period, children coordinate their verbal and nonverbal behavior (Balog and Brentari, 2008), as do adults (Bolinger, 1983; Cruttenden, 1997). Combining prosody and gesture allows children to overcome difficulties in mastering the phonological system, and to enter syntax thanks to early multimodal combinations (Özçalışkan & Goldin-Meadow, 2009).
In this study, we determine to what extent children combine modalities to express negation, and analyze the respective weight of each resource according to age. We coded the longitudinal recordings of three monolingual French children recorded monthly for one hour between 1 and 7 years old in interaction with their parents (Paris Corpus) including prosodic properties, gesture, actions, gaze and analyzed the children’s verbal behavior in interaction with their interlocutors. We then compared prosodic, gestural and verbal patterns to find semantic, directional and temporal synchronization patterns.
We show that whole body movements are most often produced in coordination with verbal production and their direction are mostly synchronized with the direction of intonation contours (rising contours with rising gestures) between 14 and 19 months. After 19 months, the children used more upper-body gestures and movements (head, chest, arms) in close parallel with their prosodic contours. As of 36-42 months, the children were more skilled at orchestrating modalities. Our results give us insights on how children become experts in face-to-face social interaction, which is multimodal in nature.