The blossoming of children’s multimodal skills from 1 to 4 years old
Résumé
Language acquisition is one of the first fields in which the multimodal aspects of language have been illustrated. Spontaneous longitudinal interactional data was required to study productions in context and the obvious role of action, gaze, gesture, facial expressions and prosody in children’s first productions was underlined by a wealth of studies. However, most research focuses on children’s first symbolic gestures and on word-gesture combinations in the first stages of development. But children, continue to use their body, and especially manual gestures, head shakes, facial expressions throughout the language acquisition process and become expert multimodal language users in face-to-face conversations. This short paper explores the blossoming of children’s multimodal skills through two exploratory studies on children’s expression of negation and on pointing gestures from one to four years old. Research based on video-data of children’s daily interactions can demonstrate the progressive mastery of coordination between bodily action, gestures and talk in conversation. Children can rely on simultaneous use of the vocal and visual modalities to gradually become competent multimodal conversationalists.
Domaines
LinguistiqueOrigine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
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