Abstract
This book consists of a number of studies of gesture and multimodality in children’s communicative development. It was previously published as a special issue in Gesture 10:2/3 (2010) and is largely comprised of work presented at the Multimod 2009 conference in Toulouse, France. One of the overall aims of that conference was to gather researchers who have studied gesture and multimodal development in children, not only in the earliest stages of communicative development, but also from the two-word stage and beyond. Research on gesture in older children was rare in 2009, but has subsequently become more common, and some of the nine articles in the book represent this new direction.
Studies of multimodal development that reach into the period when language has emerged and is starting to increase in complexity often focus precisely on how gesture and spoken, or signed, language relate to each other. In that vein, Cochet and Vauclair find that children (12–30 months) who score higher on language tests also show a stronger handedness in their pointing gestures, or, put in another way, a stronger lateralization in the brain. They find the same type of lateralization in cognitively more advanced forms of pointing, such as informative pointing in contrast to the simpler imperative pointing gestures. Morgenstern et al. present findings that suggest that the development of pointing differs between children who learn sign language, for whom pointing continues to increase in frequency from 8 to 24 months and is partly grammaticalized as personal pronouns, and children who learn spoken language, for whom some of the initial uses of pointing are replaced by verbal means and start to decrease around 21 months (cf. Andrén, 2010, p. 139). More generally, both of these two studies demonstrate how pointing continues to develop long after its initial appearance in children’s repertoires and that it is increasingly domesticated by structures of language.
Grimminger, Rohlfing and Stenneken present a study comparing parents’ use of gesture in interaction with children (22–25 months) with typical language development and children with delayed language. It was found that parents modify their behavior with regard to the proficiency levels of their children, sometimes called gestural motherese in the literature. The difference between the two groups was strongest in difficult tasks, where mothers of late talkers produced more gestures overall (especially pointing gestures) and more gestures combined with speech rather than speech alone. In both groups, more difficult tasks yielded longer durations of gestures in the parents – a phenomenon that has elsewhere been linked to interactive regulation of mutual understanding (Andrén, 2011). One of the main contributions of this study is that it takes a first step towards teasing apart what factors, such as task difficulty versus language proficiency, govern gestural motherese.
In a study of older children (13–16 years) in the context of mathematics education, Gerofsky found a strong correlation between certain ways of gesticulating in the children and teachers’ assessment of the proficiency level of the students. Top students seemed to use more of the character viewpoint gestures – e.g. ‘being the graph’ – and in a qualitative follow-up study a pedagogical approach was employed that encouraged the use of such character viewpoint gestures. This seemed to result in high rates of retention and reconstitution of knowledge, although no control group was used to verify this.
Some of the articles in the book focus on younger children. One of them is by de Villiers Rader and Zukow-Goldring who, just like Grimminger et al., also deal with questions of gestural motherese, although here in children aged 9–14 months. De Villiers Rader and Zukow-Goldring emphasize the active role of parents in children’s word learning, and, more generally, in educating children’s attention. They show how the close synchronization of mothers’ gestures or movements with speech facilitates children’s detection of segments (words) in the parent’s stream of speech. The study by Puccini et al. is similar to the extent that it emphasizes how ‘infants’ communicative input is structured by factors other than language itself’ (p. 172). In their study of 12-month-old infants and their parents they find that the use of deictic gestures is organized differently in different types of activities, in both parents and children. A free play situation based on action and manipulation of objects is contrasted with a situation based on regard of objects, similar to an exhibit. They show that the ‘same’ deictic gesture can perform a range of different speech acts and types of reference, and that the overall activity context plays an important process in allowing children to disambiguate this.
Vallotton advocates a developmental theory called Dynamic Skills Theory, according to which various skills may either promote or suppress other skills, particularly when they are first developing — resembling something like an ecology of skills. She argues that deictic gestures support, and predict, the growth of symbolic gestures, whereas the emergence of symbolic gestures suppresses the use of deictic gestures. The reason proposed is that symbolic gestures are semantically more constrained and deictic gestures therefore presumably become less relevant. She suggests further that children around 16–18 months may start using symbolic gestures less frequently (although in more varieties), suppressed by the increasing use of speech, with the result that pointing gestures become more frequent again. A possible enhancement of this study might have been not to treat ‘symbolic gestures’ as a homogeneous category, since different types of ‘symbolic gestures’ show different patterns of integration with language (Andrén, in press).
Finally, there are also two contributions that deal with methodological issues. Fais et al. investigate how infants (6 months) respond differently to language stimuli and music stimuli, with different vocal, gaze, head and torso movements. They argue that knowledge of such differential responses can be used as a dependent variable in experiments, similar to how gaze fixation and sucking behavior is often used to study children’s apprehension of various stimuli – and the results are promising. Millet and Estève propose a transcription system for deaf children (6–12 years) that captures the fact that, while signing is mainly a matter of visual expression, deaf children use their voice as well. This transcription system therefore takes a more naturalistic and descriptive approach to what the children actually do, which integrates the vocal component as well.
All of the articles in the book provide valuable insights into different aspects of the role of gesture and multimodality in children’s communicative and cognitive development. The book as a whole reflects the state of the art in this field of research and constitutes one among relatively few anthologies on this topic (e.g. Guidetti & Nicoladis, 2008; Gullberg & de Bot, 2010; Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 1998; Volterra & Erting, 1990), which is valuable in itself.