Hearing and deaf children’s gestures and signs in negative constructions
Résumé
The study of the expression of negation in longitudinal data of adult-child conversations is a privileged locus to combine multimodal analyses of gesture with prosody, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. First negative constructions seem to take over from early gestures of rejection and avoidance, but tracing the transitions between actions and gestures, and between gestures and signed or vocal expressions in very young children is quite complex. In this study, we address the expression of negation in four longitudinal studies including 1) Madeleine, a hearing child in multimodal French interactions, 2) Ellie, a hearing child in multimodal English interactions; 3) Charlotte, a deaf child of deaf parents in monomodal LSF interactions, 4) Illana, a child with one deaf, one hearing parent in bimodal bilingual (French-LSF) interactions. All the negative utterances including French, English or LSF, symbolic gestures and actions, were coded and analyzed between 12 and 36 months for the four children.
We draw the four pathways to illustrate how each child combines symbolic categories and visual/aural modalities in successive steps with respect to her own linguistic environment. We focus on palms-up and index-wave gestures and underline systematic properties at the junction between coverbal gestures and signs. To do so, we show a) their contrastive physiological patterns, b) the common properties of each pattern through the four corpora, c) their semantic and pragmatic value for the expression of negation.