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Effects of age and language on co-speechgesture production: an investigation of French,American, and Italian children's narratives

JEAN-MARC COLLETTA, MICHÈLE GUIDETTI, OLGA CAPIRCI, CARLACRISTILLI, OZLEM ECE DEMIR, RAMONA N. KUNENE-NICOLAS and SUSANLEVINE

Journal of Child Language / FirstView Article / March 2014, pp 1 - 24DOI: 10.1017/S0305000913000585, Published online: 17 February 2014

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0305000913000585

How to cite this article:JEAN-MARC COLLETTA, MICHÈLE GUIDETTI, OLGA CAPIRCI, CARLACRISTILLI, OZLEM ECE DEMIR, RAMONA N. KUNENE-NICOLAS and SUSANLEVINE Effects of age and language on co-speech gesture production: aninvestigation of French, American, and Italian children's narratives . Journal ofChild Language, Available on CJO 2014 doi:10.1017/S0305000913000585

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Effects of age and language on co-speech gestureproduction: an investigation of French, American, and

Italian children’s narratives*

JEAN-MARC COLLETTA

Université de Grenoble, LIDILEM, St Martin d’Hères, France

MICHÈLE GUIDETTI

Université Toulouse , Octogone ECCD, Toulouse, France

OLGA CAPIRCI

CNR, GLADD, Rome, Italy

CARLA CRISTILLI

University of Naples L’Orientale, Naples, Italy

OZLEM ECE DEMIR

Northwestern University, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab,Evanston, ILL, USA

RAMONA N. KUNENE-NICOLAS

University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, RSA

AND

SUSAN LEVINE

University of Chicago, Department of Psychology, Chicago, ILL, USA

(Received October –Revised August –Accepted August )

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to compare speech and co-speech gesturesobserved during a narrative retelling task in five- and ten-year-oldchildren from three different linguistic groups, French, American,

* Data collection and analysis for this study was financed by the French National ResearchAgency (projet ANR--BLANC-- et -). We thank Asela Reig Alamillo andValerio De Angelis for helping us with data coding and analysis, and we thank childrenfrom Grenoble, Toulouse, Chicago, Rome, and Naples who took part in this study.

J. Child Lang., Page of . © Cambridge University Press doi:./S

and Italian, in order to better understand the role of age and languagein the development of multimodal monologue discourse abilities.We asked five- and ten-year-old children to narrate a short, wordlesscartoon. Results showed a common developmental trend as well aslinguistic and gesture differences between the three language groups.In all three languages, older children were found to give more detailednarratives, to insert more comments, and to gesture more and usedifferent gestures – specifically gestures that contribute to the narrativestructure – than their younger counterparts. Taken together, thesefindings allow a tentative model of multimodal narrative developmentin which major changes in later language acquisition occur despitelanguage and culture differences.

INTRODUCTION

The multimodal nature (linguistic and gestural) of oral communicationis a scientific domain gaining increasing recognition today in several fields:linguistics and gesture studies (Kendon, ), psychology (McNeill,, ), and cognition and computer science (Sales Dias, Gibet,Wanderley & Bastos, ). Gestural aspects of human communicationalso have an impact in the study of language acquisition. Use of gesture isnot restricted to children whose communication is heavily reliant uponnon-verbal means in the early stages of language development. Not onlydoes the gestural mode (hand and head gestures, facial expressions, posturechanges) not disappear at the end of the so-called ‘pre-linguistic’ period,but it constitutes an indispensable basis for later linguistic communication.It evolves accordingly with linguistic and cognitive acquisition (Capirci,Caselli & De Angelis, ; Capirci & Volterra, ). Here we examinethe role of gesture in the later stages of language development, in the contextof a narrative retelling task. We examine the effect of age and languageon children’s speech and gesture production during the narrativeretelling task.

Multimodal development of narratives is an area open to examination.There are tentative models of gesture and speech production in adultssuch as the Growthpoint Theory (McNeill, ), the Interface Hypothesis(Kita & Özyürek, ), or the Sketch model (de Ruiter, ). However,these models focus on the representational aspects of language, as shownfor example by Özyürek, Kita, Allen, Brown, Furman, and Ishizuka(), and do not consider the role of gesture in discourse and pragmaticdimensions. Our study tackles the multimodal narrative abilities of childrenin three languages never compared before. We bring forward elements thatargue for a tentative model of multimodal narrative development includingdiscourse and pragmatic dimensions.

COLLETTA ET AL.

The role of gesture in the early development of multimodal communication

Gesture plays a key role in early language acquisition. Before saying theirfirst word, the infant uses of a repertoire of gestural signals that have com-municative functions: the child expresses his/her emotions by using differentfacial expressions, designates objects with glances and gestures, knowshow to wave in greeting, negates with the head, etc. (Bates, Benigni,Bretherton, Camaioni & Volterra, ; Bates, Camaioni & Volterra, ;Blake, ; Guidetti, , ; Volterra & Erting, ). The appearanceof pointing gesture constitutes an important milestone in acquisitionas it marks the child’s entry into referential communication in the firstyear (Butterworth, ; Camaioni, ; Pizzuto & Capobianco, ;Tomasello, Carpenter & Liszkowski, ). A relationship has been estab-lished between pointing gesture production at a particular age and laterlexical acquisition (Carpenter, Nagell & Tomasello, ).

During the second year, new gestures appear, including gestures performedby an empty hand, which are endowed with representational (gestures thatshape objects and characters) and pragmatic properties (gestures that mean‘open’, ‘give’). These gestures are considered to be similar to first words(Caselli, ; Iverson, Capirci & Caselli, ). Furthermore, childrenstart to combine referential (i.e. representational and pointing) gesturesand words. Children use their capacity to combine two signals in bimodalmessages (gesture+word) before being able to combine two words ina single message (Capirci, Iverson, Pizzuto & Volterra, ; Iverson& Goldin-Meadow, ; Özçaliskan & Goldin-Meadow, , ;Volterra, Caselli, Capirci & Pizzuto, ). Whether used alone or incombination with words, early gestures allow children to further expresswhat meaning they want to convey.

Gesture and language in the later development of multimodal communication

As they get older, children are faced with more complex languagetasks. Narrative is important as a form of complex language task. It requireslinguistic as well as social and cognitive abilities (Berman, ; Hickmann,). First, the narrative presents a more constrained form than a singleutterance, and the daily use of language to narrate events relies on the abilityto understand and generate linguistic information organized at this level, suchas in expository discourse (verbal explanations and reasoning). Second, thenarrative displays specific properties of coherence and cohesion (Halliday &Hasan, ) that has no equivalent in the course of dialogue which isconstructed out of the sequencing of short speech turns. Third, the actionof storytelling requires cognitive abilities such as expressing absent referents,contextualizing linguistic information, and cognitive decentration to read theinterlocutor’s or the reader’s mind (Hickmann, ; Tolchinsky, ).

AGE, LANGUAGE, AND CHILDREN ’S NARRATIVES

Although narrative presents children with unique challenges, the role gestureplays in narrative production is not well established. Thus, our understandingof the gestures that children use in narrative production is limited, and evenless is known about the factors that influence the gestures that accompanynarratives.

The picture we get from the existing studies is that of a series of jointlyrelated changes in gesture use and linguistic abilities. It is known that,from the third year onwards, the gestural repertoire is reorganized andnew types of co-speech gestures appear in later stages of language develop-ment (Colletta, ; McNeill, ), like beats (e.g. rhythmic gestures ofthe hand or the head that accompany certain syllables or words); metaphoricgestures that express abstract concepts (e.g. pointing behind to express thepast or pointing in front to express the future, two hands forming a roundshape to express the idea of completeness, separating the frontal space intwo parts to express opposition); gestures of discourse cohesion (e.g. gesturesthat accompany connectives, abstract pointing to specific and empty spotsin the frontal space of the speaker to refer to the objects and charactershe is talking about). As regards the gesture–speech relation, a studyby Alibali, Evans, Hostetter, Ryan & Mainela-Arnold () on co-speechrepresentational gestures found children to be less redundant than adultswhen gesturing during a narrative task.

Second, the language task in which children are involved is a key predictorof the types of gesture children produce. For example, Reig Alamillo,Colletta & Guidetti () compared oral narration vs. oral explanationand found that pragmatic gestures and subordinate markers were morefrequent in explanations than in narratives, whereas cohesion markerswere more often used in narratives. Moreover, gestures of the abstract areobservable from the age of six years onwards in the child who formulatesexplanations (Colletta & Pellenq, ; Goldin-Meadow, ), yet thiskind of gesture is hardly ever produced by six-year-olds in oral narrativetasks.

The studies on multimodal narratives from French children and adults(Colletta, , ; Colletta, Pellenq & Guidetti, ), Italian children(Capirci, Cristilli, De Angelis & Graziano, ; Graziano, ), andZulu children and adults (Kunene, ) revealed that the developmentof gestural behavior accompanies the development of narrative behavior.As such, with age, children seem to produce longer and more detailednarratives, including reported speech and various types of commentaries.Gestures and expressive mimics can contribute as markers to this

[] All gesture types mentioned in the ‘Introduction’ are defined in the ‘Appendix’ at the endof this paper.

COLLETTA ET AL.

information complexity, both on the structural and the pragmatic dimension.The more complex narratives are on the syntactic and pragmatic levels,the more gesture they include, specifically framing and cohesive gestures(Colletta et al., ). Here we examine the role of age in children’smultimodal narrative production within a single study.

The role of language and culture in the development ofmultimodal communication

Past research has shown that the structure of the language itself influencesgesture production. In terms of semantic differences, not all languagesexpress space, location, and motion in the same way (Talmy, ).Speakers who express manner and path in satellite-framed languagessuch as English (e.g. to go+up/down/across) were found to produce differentrepresentational gestures in the accompanying gesture behavior to thosewho express manner and path in verb-framed languages such as French(e.g. monter/descendre/traverser) (Gullberg, Hendricks & Hickmann, )or Turkish (Özyürek, Kita, Allen, Furman & Brown, ). In terms ofsyntactic differences, some languages require an explicit subject, such asEnglish and French, whereas others are null-subject languages, such asItalian, Spanish, or Zulu. This characteristic requires distinct markingsof referential continuity in the textual use of language, with less need torepeat anaphora in the latter case (Hickmann, ). It is also suspectedto have an effect on the production of gesture, for example, co-speech gesturecan compensate for the absence of linguistic anaphora in a null-subjectlanguage (Cristilli, Capirci & Graziano, ; Demir, So, Özyürek &Goldin-Meadow, ; Kunene, ; Yoshioka, ).

In addition to language differences, another key factor influencingmultimodal communication is culture as a set of values and norms thathelp shape the social behavior of individuals who belong to a culturalgroup as well as social interaction between them. Past research has shownthat culture places restrictions on multimodal communication in all aspects:ritualized forms of interpersonal interaction, the use and form of speech acts,genres of monologues which are a part of narrative and expository texts(Saville-Troïke, ). Furthermore, culture expresses itself in a non-verbalcode during communication, including the use of emblems (Morris, ;Pika, Nicoladis & Marentette, ), facial expressions (Ekman, )and co-speech gesture (Kendon, ; Kita & Özyürek, ; McNeill,). It was reported that Italians use a great number of gestures whencommunicating (Kendon, ). Conversely, Western culture, includingNorth American culture, has been described as a culture that is poorin body contact and gesture (Barnlund, ). Additionally, in the culturaladaptation process, gesture recognition plays an important role

AGE, LANGUAGE, AND CHILDREN ’S NARRATIVES

(see Molinsky, Krabbenhoft, Ambady & Choi, ). The postulate thatoriginates from these observations is that, under the influence of socializ-ation, children will mobilize these resources in different ways dependingon their culture or origins. A study by Iverson, Capirci, Volterra &Goldin-Meadow () on early communication showed that, from a veryearly age, Italian children use more gestures and have a bigger gesturerepertoire than American children in referential communication. Herewe ask whether the language and culture that children are exposed tohas an effect on their gesture production during narrative retelling.

Aims of the present study

The present study concentrates on speech and gestural production inthe same narrative retelling task in three different linguistic groups, andquestions the common characteristics of late multimodal development inthese groups: French, American, and Italian children. To our knowledge,this is the first study comparing both the speech and gestural productionof these three groups of children. In terms of hypotheses, on the develop-mental side, we expected narratives to get longer and more complex on thesyntactic as well as pragmatic level, to have more gesture and, amongstgestures, to observe more cohesive and framing gestures with age(see Colletta et al., ). We also expected to find a similar developmentaltrajectory in the American, French, and Italian corpora, which wouldconfirm the existence of a general developmental pattern of textual andmonologue abilities, already highlighted on the linguistic aspects of spokentexts (Berman, ; Berman & Slobin, ; Hickmann, ), but notyet confirmed on the gestural dimension. On the cross-linguistic side,studying the development of narrative behavior in three different groupsallows us to examine the effects of the constraints of different languagesand cultural backgrounds on multimodal communication. Here we expectedto see more gestures in narratives produced by Italian children comparedto French and American children, and among them, more representationalgestures for linguistic and cultural reasons. Italian is a highly ellipticallanguage (Simone, ), which causes reference tracking in the narrativeto be less explicit than in French or English. If the hypothesis of acompensation link between speech and gesture is applicable, a part ofthis marking should be completed through representational gesturesthat help construct and/or express the referent. As a consequence, the pro-portion of those gestures should be higher in the Italian narratives thanin the other narratives. Based on previously reported cultural differences,we also expect Italian children to use more gestures than French andAmerican children during a narrative task, and American children to usethe least.

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METHOD

Participants

Ninety-eight participants belonging to three linguistic groups (French,American, and Italian) and two age groups (five and ten years of age) wereobserved with the same protocol. Gender was nearly equal for most of thegroups (see the distribution of participants in Table ). The three groupshave been made homogeneous with respect to both SES (predominantlyupper-middle-class children) and ethnicity (mostly Caucasian). All childrenare L speakers of their country dominant language and attended preschoolsfor the younger children and primary schools for the older ones, where theywere selected in the grades corresponding to their age.

Procedure

The protocol was suitable for both age groups and consisted of videotapingthe children in a semi-school environment (at school but out of the class-room), in narrative and explanatory tasks. Participants were asked to watcha video extract ( minutes and seconds) of a wordless cartoon, takenfrom the series Tom & Jerry, and to retell (constrained narrative) the storyit depicted as well as answer some comprehension questions (explanationsin a dialogue context) about the same story. In the present study, we willfocus only on the narrative production task.

The cartoon starts with a mother bird leaving her egg in the nest. The eggaccidentally falls out and rolls into Jerry’s house. The egg hatches in

TABLE . Distribution of participants by language and age (years;months)

Five years Ten years Total

French children

girls girlsM=; M=;SD=; SD=;Range=;–; Range=;–;

American children

girls girlsM=; M=;SD=; SD=;Range=;– ; Range=;–;

Italian children

girls girlsM=; M=;SD=; SD=;Range=;–; Range=;–;

Total

AGE, LANGUAGE, AND CHILDREN ’S NARRATIVES

Jerry’s house and a baby woodpecker emerges. The baby bird then startsdamaging Jerry’s furniture. After a few failed attempts to calm the birddown, Jerry gets angry and decides to put the bird back in its nest.

The participants’ narratives were videotaped for later analysis. The datathus consisted of ninety-eight narratives told by the French (data collectedin Grenoble and Toulouse), American (data collected in Chicago), andItalian children (data collected in Naples and Rome), collected with exactlythe same procedure.

Coding

To analyze this cross-linguistic corpus, the research team defined a commonprocedure to transcribe and annotate the verbal and the gestural data.A multi-tier coding grid was conceived using the software ELAN (http://www.lat-mpi.eu/tools/elan/) and the coding manual accompanies this anno-tation system. It presents the conventions of transcription for utterances,adapted from the Belgium VALIBEL transcription system (http://www.uclouvain.be/cps/ucl/doc/valibel/documents/conventions_valibel_.PDF),defines the linguistic and gestural variables which are to be analyzed,explains the manner of coding tier by tier, and provides examples for eachvariable. An illustration of our coding system is provided in the ‘Appendix’and shows an extract from an annotated file on ELAN.The transcription of the speakers’ words appears on two tracks: one track

for the interviewer and one for the child. The transcription is orthographicaland presents the entirety of the remarks of the speakers. An example ofa narrative produced by a French six-year-old is provided below with thecorresponding English translation:

EXAMPLE: En premier c’était la maman, elle tricotait, et puis après elle estpartie, et puis l’œuf il bougeait, et puis après il est tombé, il est arrivé dansla maison de la petite souris, et puis la petite souris elle s’est réveillée, et elles’est réveillée, et puis elle était assise dessus l’œuf, et puis après elle est partie,parce qu’elle avait peur un peu, et puis après il commençait à craquer l’œuf,et puis après il commençait à marcher, et puis petite souris elle va enleverl’œuf, qui est resté en haut sur la tête, et puis le petit il a dit maman, et puisaprès il cassait tout, et après il l’a ramené chez lui la petite souris dans son nid.TRANSLATION: ‘First there was the mummy, she was knitting, and then sheleft, and then the egg, it moved, and then it fell down, it ended up in thelittle mouse’s house, and then the little mouse, he woke up, he woke up,and then he was sitting on top of the egg, and then he left, because

[] The annotation system was first described in Colletta, Kunene, Venouil, Kauffman,and Simon (), and was reproduced in Kunene (). The complete English versionis accessible at <http://w.u-grenoble.fr/lidilem/labo/file/ANRMultimodalityresearch-codingmanual.pdf>.

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he was a bit scared, and then it started to crack, the egg, and then it started towalk, and then the little mouse, he went and took off the egg that was still onits head, and then the little one said mummy, and then it broke everything,and then he brought it back to its house, the little mouse, to its nest.’

Speech coding

As for the linguistic coding, we focused on threemeasures: clauses, connectors,and anaphora. We segmented the child’s speech into clauses and words. Thenumber of clauses contained in an account provides a good indication of itsinformational quantity, which is likely to grow with age. As for words, theelements coded as connectives in our corpus include the words that contributeto discourse structure marking temporal relations (then, later, already, first,next, finally, now, etc., and the French and Italian corresponding connectives),logical or argumentative relations between utterances (because, since, so, there-fore, but, or, though, if, given that, etc.), reformulation (in other words, in fact,etc.), conversational markers (well, there, etc.), and other connectives markingmore than one of these relations (and, then).

The category of anaphors includes linguistic expressions that serve tomaintain the identity of previously introduced referents throughout thetext. Anaphoric expressions differ in their referential content: personalpronouns are one of the anaphoric expressions with less referential content,and their adequate use is conditioned by the speaker’s judgment on the avail-ability of the referent. Definite NPs, on the other hand, specify most of theinformation needed to identify their referent, but their use in circumstanceswhere the referent is clearly identifiable is perceived as redundant. The ref-erential expressions included under the category of anaphors in the analysisare: personal pronouns (e.g. and the egg [referent underlined] moves aroundand it [anaphor in bold] falls into a spider’s web), relative pronouns (e.g.and unfortunately it ends up in the house that belongs to Jerry, who is asleep),and definite noun phrases, including definite NPs with or without lexicalrepetition (e.g. then the egg cracked, the fledgling cracked the egg; but the littlebird still has the shell over its eyes . . . and then the woodpecker says mummy),and proper names (e.g. Jerry helped it a bit and as soon as the fledgling sawJerry). These three types of anaphoric expression were included in theanalysis because of their high frequency, and because their adequate use,due to the different discursive and cognitive status of their referent, hasbeen pointed out as one of the landmarks of late language development(Hickmann & Hendricks, ).

Gesture coding

For the coding of co-speech gesture, we defined ways to identify and thencode gestures and their relationship to speech on several dimensions.

AGE, LANGUAGE, AND CHILDREN ’S NARRATIVES

In Kendon’s () work, a pointing gesture, a representational gesture, orany other hand gesture (an excursion of the body during speech) is calleda ‘gesture phrase’, and it possesses several phases including the preparation,the stroke, (i.e. the meaningful part of the gesture phrase), the retraction, andthe repositioning for a new gesture phrase. Yet some gestures are nothing butstrokes: a head gesture or a facial expression, for instance, are meaningfulright from the start until the end of the movement and have no preparatoryor retraction phases. Our premise, therefore, was that a gesture was anyco-speech gesture phrase or isolated gesture stroke that needed to beannotated.

To identify the gestures, each coder took into account the following threecriteria (based on Kendon’s, , proposals):

(i) if the movement was easy to perceive, of good amplitude, or wellmarked by its speed (on a scale of to , being the strongest value);

(ii) if location was in the frontal space of the speaker, for the interlocutor(on a scale of to , being the strongest value);

(iii) if there was a precise hand shape or a well-marked trajectory (on a scaleof to , being the strongest value).

Once a gesture had been identified (total score>), the coder annotatedits phases using the above-quoted values based on Kendon (). Thecoder then attributed a function to each gesture stroke. In the literature ongesture function, there generally appears to be agreement amongst gestureresearchers, although they do not always agree on terminology. Accordingto several researchers (Kendon, ; McNeill ), four main functionsare always mentioned: referential gestures that help to identify (pointinggestures) or represent concrete and abstract referents; framing and pragmaticgestures that express social attitudes, mental states, and emotions andthat help perform speech acts and comment on one’s own speech as wellas others’; gestures that mark speech and discourse, including discoursecohesion gestures; and interactive gestures that help to synchronize one’sown behavior with the interlocutor’s in social interaction. Our gestureannotation scheme relies mostly on Kendon’s () and Colletta’s() classifications and covers the whole range of these functions.The coders had to choose between: representational, discursive, framing,performative, interactive, and word searching (see ‘Appendix’ for detailedexplanations).

Gesture–speech relations

We also coded gesture–speech relations as reinforces, integrates, sup-plements, complements, contradicts, and substitutes (see ‘Appendix’ fordetailed explanations).

COLLETTA ET AL.

Rates per clause

In order to ensure comparability across groups, we took the total number ofeach type of linguistic or gestural component (e.g. the number of anaphors,the number of framing gestures, etc.) and divided it by the number ofclauses. These rates allowed us to account for individual and age groupdifferences, as well as to compare the proportions of linguistic and gesturalcomponents in the different groups.

Reliability

Reliability in transcription and coding of the children’s words wasestablished after three transcripts of the words of the speakers. In order toestablish reliability in gesture coding, two separate coders identified thegesture units and attributed a function to each stroke. A third coder validatedtheir annotations and settled any disagreements. To assess the level ofagreement, we used the / agreement method (Colletta et al., ): thereis agreement when at least two out of the three coders agree on the presenceof a stroke or on the function to attribute to a stroke. Inter-rater agreementon the identification of gesture units was %, and agreement on the functionattributed to each stroke was %.

RESULTS

Prior to the parametric analysis, we performed Levene’s test to check theequality of variance in our results. The test was not significant for any ofthe measures, and all the data were processed with two-way ANOVAs: agegroups (: five- and ten-year-olds)× language groups (: French, Italian,English). Age and language were regarded as between-groups factors. Thissection is organized to present data according to the two types of effectsexpected: age and language. The results for the linguistic measures arepresented in the first subsection, followed by the analysis of the gesturalmeasures. Tables to present the narrative, linguistic, and gesturalmeasures for both age groups and for the three language groups.

Effects of age and language on linguistic measures

Table shows the means and standard deviations (SDs) for the number ofclauses and the rates of connectives and anaphors in the narratives producedby the two age groups in each language group.

The results for the number of clauses indicated that there was an effect ofage, an effect of language group, and a significant interaction between ageand language group. We found a significant effect of age on the number ofclauses (F(,)=·, p< ·, ηp

= ·), indicating that older childrenproduced longer narratives overall than younger children. Also informative

AGE, LANGUAGE, AND CHILDREN ’S NARRATIVES

is the group effect (F(,)=·, p< ·, ηp= ·) confirmed by post-hoc

tests (Tukey, p< ·) showing that the French children had the longestnarratives, with an average of clauses per narrative, and the Americanchildren had the shortest ( clauses); the Italian children were betweenthe two, with an average of clauses. The interaction between the twofactors was also significant (F(,)=·, p= ·, ηp

= ·), indicatingthat the observed effect of age depended on the group. In other words, theage effect was stronger for French children than for the two other groups,and in all cases the ten-year-olds’ narratives were significantly longer thanthose of the five-year-olds. The between-group differences were higher forFrench and Italian children than for American children.

Turning to discourse cohesion, the analysis of the connective rate (numberof connectives per clause) showed a significant effect of group (F(,)=·,p= ·, ηp

= ·), indicating, and confirmed by post-hoc tests (Tukey,p= ·), that the use of connectives was higher in the French children’sgroup than in the Italian children’s group. The analysis also showed a sign-ificant interaction between language group and age (F(,)=·, p= ·,ηp= ·), indicating that the effect of group depended on age: the narrativesproduced by the French younger children had a higher rate of connectivesthan the one produced by the American younger children and all theItalian children. The effect was reversed for the connectives produced bythe American children, whose rate was significantly higher in older childrenthan in the younger group; these effects were confirmed by the post-hoc tests(Tukey, p< ·).

The second measure accounting for discourse cohesion was the presenceof anaphoric elements. The analysis of the anaphor rate (number ofanaphors per clause) indicated that both age and language group effectswere significant. The age effect (F(,)=·, p= ·, ηp

= ·), showedthat, overall, there were more anaphors per clause in the discourses producedby the older children. The group effect (F(,)=·, p= ·, ηp

= ·),

TABLE . Means (SD) of linguistic measures for five- and ten-year-olds’narratives in each linguistic group

Clauses Connective rates Anaphor rates

French children Five-year-olds · (·) · (·) · (·)Ten-year-olds · (·) · (·) · (·)

American children Five-year-olds · (·) · (·) · (·)Ten-year-olds · (·) · (·) · (·)

Italian children Five-year-olds · (·) · (·) · (·)Ten-year-olds · (·) · (·) · (·)

NOTE: Rates calculated by dividing the total number of each linguistic type by the numberof clauses.

COLLETTA ET AL.

showed that the highest anaphor rate was produced by the French childrenfollowed by the Italian children and then by the American children. Thepost-hoc tests confirmed (Tukey, p< ·) that only the differences betweenthe French and the American groups and between the American and theItalian groups were significant.

Effects of age and language on gestural measures

Table shows the means and standard deviations of the gesture measuresincluded in the analysis: gesture rate (number of co-speech gesturesby clause) and rates of representational gestures, discursive gestures, andframing gestures. The ‘other gestures’ category brought together interactive,performative, and word searching for both age groups and for the threelanguage groups of children.

In the analysis of the gesture rate, only language group was found to havea significant effect (F(,)=·, p= ·, ηp

= ·), showing that the gesturerate was higher in the Italian group than in the French group (Tukey,p< ·), the American children occupying an intermediary position betweenthe French and the Italian, but the differences were not found to be signifi-cant. A closer look at the different types of gesture yielded interestinginformation about the effects of age and language on the children’s use ofco-speech gestures.

For the representational gesture rate, only the language group effect wassignificant (F(,)=·, p= ·, ηp

= ·), indicating, as confirmed bythe post-hoc tests (Tukey, p< ·), that the Italian children producedmore representational gestures than the French and the American children.Representational gestures were therefore the most frequent type of gestureproduced by the three groups, and produced more frequently by theten-year-olds than by the five-year-olds, even if these differences were notsignificant.

TABLE . Means (SD) of gesture measures for five- and ten-year-olds’narratives in each linguistic group

Gesturerate

Representationalgesture rate

Discursivegesturerate

Framinggesturerate

Othergesturerate

French children Five-year-olds · (·) · (·) · (·) · (·) · (·)Ten-year-olds · (·) · (·) · (·) · (·) · (·)

American children Five-year-olds · (·) · (·) · (·) · (·) · (·)Ten-year-olds · (·) · (·) · (·) · (·) · (·)

Italian children Five-year-olds · (·) · (·) · (·) · (·) · (·)Ten-year-olds · (·) · (·) · (·) · (·) · (·)

NOTE: Rates calculated by dividing the total number of each gesture type by the number ofclauses.

AGE, LANGUAGE, AND CHILDREN ’S NARRATIVES

In the analysis of the discursive gesture rate, age and the languagegroup effects were both significant (F(,)=·, p= ·, ηp

= ·;F(,)=·, p=., ηp

= ·, respectively), indicating that the olderchildren produced significantly more discursive gestures than youngerchildren, and that, as confirmed by post-hoc tests (Tukey, p< .), theAmerican children produced more discursive gestures (i.e. gestures helpingto structure speech or mark cohesion) by clause than the French children.

For the framing gesture rate, only the language group effect was significant(F(,)=·, p= ·, ηp

= ·), and showed that, as confirmed by post-hoctests (Tukey, p< ·), French children produced significantly more framinggestures than their Italian counterparts.

In the analysis of other gestures (performative, interactive, and wordsearching gestures gathered together), only the age effect was found to besignificant (F(,)=·, p= ·, ηp

= ·). It showed that the five-year-oldchildren produced more of these types of gesture by clause than theten-year-olds, except in the Italian group.

Finally, Table presents the data concerning the gesture–speech relations(reinforce, integrate, supplement; ‘other relation’ included the scarcenumbers for the complement, contradicts, and substitute categories). AnANOVA with repeated measures was carried out on these data, with ageand language as between-groups factors and type of gesture–speech relationas a within-subjects factor. The analysis showed a language group effect(F(,)=·, p= ·, ηp

= ·), and all the interactions between type ofgesture–speech relation and language and age groups were found to besignificant (F(,)=·, p< ·, ηp

= ·; F(,)=·, p< ·,ηp= ·; F(,)=·, p= ·, ηp

= ·, respectively). In other words,the gesture–speech relation, which aims to ‘integrate’, and where theinformation provided by the gesture adds precision to the encoded linguisticinformation, was the most frequently produced, particularly by the Italianchildren (Tukey, p< · in all cases) and by the older children in alllanguage groups (Tukey, p< · in all cases).

TABLE . Means (SD) of gesture–speech relation types for five- andten-year-olds’ narratives in each linguistic group

Reinforce Integrate Supplement Other relation

French children Five-year-olds · (·) · (·) · (·) · (·)Ten-year-olds · (·) · (·) · (·) · (·)

American children Five-year-olds · (·) · (·) · (·) · (·)Ten-year-olds · (·) · (·) · (·) · (·)

Italian children Five-year-olds · (·) · (·) · (·) · (·)Ten-year-olds · (·) · (·) · (·) · (·)

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DISCUSSION

Based on a common method, this cross-linguistic investigation of multi-modal narratives produced by children from two age groups added to thefindings on the effect of age, language, and culture on multimodal languageacquisition, and raised new questions.

Effects of age on multimodal narratives

With regard to age, similar differences occurred between younger andolder children in all the three language groups, which suggest a commondevelopmental trend in multimodal discourse abilities despite thelanguage and culture particularities. Interestingly, these differences appearedin the gestural aspects of narrative behavior as well as in their linguisticaspects.

First, older children in all three language groups produced longernarratives than their younger counterparts. This developmental changewas put forward decades ago in the literature on narrative development.It shows in recent multimodal studies for French (Colletta, , ;Colletta et al., ), as well as for Italian (Graziano, ) and Zulu(Kunene, ).

Second, as suggested by the increase in the rate of anaphora, olderchildren’s narratives contained more information. The above-mentionedmultimodal studies also found qualitative age-related changes on the ling-uistic measures and a greater complexity in the linguistic markings. Thesechanges may result in a more detailed account of the narrative, as in thestudies on Italian and Zulu narratives (Graziano, ; Kunene, );they may also result in a greater pragmatic complexity in the retelling ofthe story, with older children and adults adding more meta-narrative andpara-narrative comments to their account (Colletta et al., ).

Importantly, we did not find an age-related increase in gesture rate (exceptfor Italian children). However, the kind of gestures children produced in thecontext of narrative production varied with age. Older children relied moreon discursive (cohesive) gestures, less on gestures that are not directly relatedto the narratives task (other gestures), and they favored the ‘integrate’relation between speech and gesture which resolves in packed bimodal infor-mation. All in all, this result confirms the changes put forward by Colletta() and Colletta et al. (), by Graziano (), and by Kunene() for French, Italian, and Zulu respectively, with an increase in theuse of co-speech gesture directly associated with narration during childhood,and, in the meantime, a modification of the gesture repertoire of the childand in the use of gestures. The research on children’s narratives and gesturesis now well advanced and, together with these results, allows a tentativemodel of multimodal narrative development in which major changes

AGE, LANGUAGE, AND CHILDREN ’S NARRATIVES

in later language acquisition occur despite language and cultural differences.The following elements present the basic picture of these changes innarrative behavior.

Whatever the language, the co-speech gesture system evolves in laterlanguage acquisition in order to fulfill new specific functions or newcommunicative aims, such as, in our case, narrating fictitious – or real, asin the study reported by Colletta – events. In other words, languagedevelopment and gesture development are tightly related during childhood.Younger, five-year-old children in the last year of preschool, who aretypically more at ease with dialogue and interactive language formats, findthe monologue production of narrating a story a difficult task, and produceshort and elliptical narratives. They do gesture, and their gesture sometimesreflects their own difficulties in dealing with monologue languageproduction, and with the adult who needs to prompt them and scaffoldtheir narrative production. The high proportion of word searching gesturesand of gestures expressing pragmatic and interactive functions in the youngerchildren’s gesture production indexes their constant move back towardsa dialogue format.

Older, ten-year-old children on the way to secondary school have devel-oped narrative abilities that show in the length of their linguistic productionas well as in their linguistic and gestural aspects. They hold on to the mono-logue production task from the start till the end, concentrate on the narrative,and deliver longer and more detailed accounts. This greater complexity inlinguistic information goes along with an increasing use of co-speech gestureto represent and track the characters from the story, to enlighten the events,to mark the discourse progression – the breaks in the narrative thread andbetween telling the event and commenting on it – to express feelingstowards the story or the task, to modify the illocutionary value of a clause,etc. (Colletta, ; Graziano, ). Children of this age who do gesturerely on gesture resources as well as on linguistic resources to accomplishthe task. Their narratives show how intricate the two types of sign systemare in discourse production.

Our study has some limitations. As for this comparative study, welack more refined age classes. When available (Colletta et al., ;Kunene, ), adult narratives show statistically significant changes fromten-year-olds’ with respect to narrative content and structure, and thepragmatics of narration. On the same ground, eight- and twelve-year-olds’narratives show statistically significant changes from six- and ten-year-olds’(Kunene, ). As for the most used type of gesture – representationalgesture – there are developmental differences in their shape and meaningbetween the ages of four and ten years (Graziano, ) that need tobe explored in greater detail, as they help track cognitive changes in theway children represent the characters, scenes, and actions in a story.

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These changes may be unseen when focusing solely on the children’s words.Other types of gesture that have a framing or a discourse cohesion functionalso need to be investigated to help understand when and how pragmaticand discourse constraints evolve during childhood. As for the relationshipbetween gesture and speech, it is found to be far more complex in the multi-modal language production of children aged six years and over than inyounger children. Starting with the categories put forward by researcherswho have studied early language development (Capirci et al., ;Özçaliskan & Goldin-Meadow, , ), we had to work out newcategories (integrates, contradicts, substitutes) that need to be studied ingreater detail in the future.

Effects of language on linguistic measures

Despite the common developmental trends, interesting language andcultural differences were observed. Concerning the effects of language onlinguistic measures, we found that French children spoke longer and usedmore connectives than the other two groups. In all three countries, preschoolfavors the use of oral language in dialogue format and does not focusexplicitly on training children to retell stories, whereas primary school favorsthe use of written and academic language without focusing on training oralnarrative abilities. Learning how to retell stories and narrate from fictitiousmedia or real life mostly remains as a language acquisition issue ratherthan as a formal learning one in all three countries. Future studies shouldexamine factors such as the home environment in order to explain sucha cultural difference.

The Italian group did not produce less anaphora than the other twogroups, because zero anaphora was coded for along with other types ofanaphora, as unmarked anaphora is commonly used in Italian languageand represented % of all linguistic anaphora in the Italian data.The shortness of American children’s narratives compared to their Italian

and French counterparts could be explained by grammatical constraints.For instance, translators are accustomed to shorter versions of French textsin English, as a number of grammatical features contribute to shortenEnglish sentences compared to French: subject+verb contraction, verb+negation contraction, elision of the determiner, elision of the verb, themarking of the possessive, the verb+preposition construction. However,the anaphor rate was also found to be lower in the American narrativescompared to the French and Italian narratives, and grammar does notaccount for this result. The explanation lies rather in the content of thenarratives delivered by American children. Unlike their French and Italiancounterparts, the American children produced narratives that includeda lot of comments. The more meta-narrative and para-narrative comments

AGE, LANGUAGE, AND CHILDREN ’S NARRATIVES

there are, the less anaphoric marks there are, as these help tracking the mainreferents from the story plot, as shown by McNeill ().

Effects of language on gesture measures

Concerning the effects of language on gesture measures, first we found thatthe greater use of gestures by Italians was confirmed for Italian children ina monologue narrative task. Second, we found that French children, likeAmerican children, produced less representational gestures while narratingthan their Italian counterparts. On the other hand, we found a higher rateof framing gestures for the French, and of discursive gestures for theAmerican children. Studying the gestural production of two-year-oldItalian and American children, Iverson et al. () found a higher pro-portion of representational gestures in the Italian children’s repertoire thanin the American children’s. The result from our study confirms this differ-ence for older children attending primary school and is consistent with thefact that Italian children favored the ‘integrate’ gesture speech-relationwhich characterizes the use of representational gestures.

Although we did not look for direct evidence of the compensatory roleof representational gestures towards linguistic reference tracking in a zeroanaphora language, these results are in line with a study on the same set ofdata (Capirci, Colletta, Cristilli, De Angelis & Graziano, ), in whichthe Italian children were found to use a representational strategy to trackand disambiguate referents in gesture. These new and conclusive resultsare in line with studies by Gullberg () and Yoshioka (), and theyconfirm the crucial role played by gesture in reference tracking for youngnarrators of a zero anaphora language.

Studying narrative production in various languages also brings to lightcultural differences. A comparison of French and Zulu narratives (Kunene,) showed striking differences in the linguistic as well as in the gesturalaspects of adults’ and children’s narratives. Unlike the French older childrenand adults, the Zulu older children and adults delivered far more precisenarratives and used a lot more gestures, rarely interrupted the telling ofthe events to insert a personal comment, behaved differently dependingon the genre (male or female), and the males used a wider gesture spaceexpanding over the frontal space. Cultural particularities in literacy concep-tions as well as in everyday social behavior may help to explain these differ-ences. We can also hypothesize that they have an effect on the way peoplerespond to data collection methods. A previous study on French spontaneousnarratives produced by French children aged six to eleven years (Colletta,) showed advanced social abilities in the ten- and eleven-year-oldsthat did not show in the children’s narratives collected for our study.

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All in all, our comparative study on American, Italian, and Frenchnarratives brought some unexpected differences (length of narratives,cohesion, use of certain types of gesture) that may have to do with structuraldifferences between the languages, and broader cultural differences in thethree societies, if not with conceptions of narrative. Importantly, despitesome linguistic and cultural peculiarities, the results of this study clearlyargue for a developmental model of multimodal narrative productionwithin three languages not yet compared in the literature. As children’sspeech became more complex in the context of narrative production, so didtheir gestures, specifically those that contribute to the narrative structure.These findings add evidence to the subtlety and strength of the relationshipbetween speech and gesture in later language development and pavethe way for future research. Further investigations on formal aspectsof representational gestures, the use of framing gestures, and the gesture–speech relation of non-representational gestures would be of interest for abetter understanding of the gesture–speech system development in thesethree languages and others.

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APPENDIX

DETAILED EXPLANATIONS FOR THE CODING SYSTEM FOR GESTURES

For gesture functions, the coders had to choose between:

(i) Representational: hand or facial gesture, associated or not toother parts of the body, which represents an object or a property ofthis object, a place, a trajectory, an action, a character or an attitude(e.g. two hands drawing the form of the referent; hand or head gesturepointing to a spot that locates a virtual character or object in frontalspace; hand or head moving in some direction to represent the trajectoryof the referent; two hands or body mimicking an action), or whichsymbolizes, by metaphor or metonymy, an abstract idea (e.g. handor head movement towards the left or the right to symbolize the pastor the future; gesture metaphors for abstract concepts).

(ii) Discursive: cohesive gesture which aids in structuring speech anddiscourse by the accentuation or highlighting of certain linguisticunits (e.g. beat gesture accompanying a certain word; repeated beatsaccompanying stressed syllables), or which marks discourse cohesionby linking clauses or discourse units (e.g. brief hand gesture or beataccompanying a connective; abstract pointing gesture with an anaphoricfunction, e.g. pointing to a spot to refer to a character or an objectpreviously referred to and assigned to this spot).

(iii) Framing: gesture which expresses an emotional or mental state of thenarrator (e.g. face showing amusement to express the comical side

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of an event; shoulder shrug or facial expression of doubt to express theincertitude of what is being asserted).

(iv) Performative: gesture which allows the gestural realization of a speechact (e.g. head nod as a ‘yes’ answer, head shake as a ‘no’ answer), orwhich co-expresses, together with the verbal utterance, the illocutionaryvalue of a speech act (e.g. head nod accompanying a ‘yes’ answer, headshake accompanying a ‘no’ answer).

(v) Interactive: gesture accompanied by a gaze towards the interlocutorto express that the speaker requires or verifies his attention, or showsthat he has reached the end of his speech turn or his narrative,or towards the speaker to show his own attention (e.g. nodding headwhile interlocutor speaks).

(vi) Word searching: hand gesture or facial expression which indicates thatthe speaker is searching for a word or expression (e.g. frowning, staringabove, tapping fingers while searching for words).

For gesture–speech relation, the coders had to choose between:

(i) Reinforces: the information brought by the gesture is identical tothe linguistic information it is in relation to, as when a nodding headis accompanied by a ‘yes’ of an affirmative.

(ii) Integrates: the information provided by the gesture adds precisionto the encoded linguistic information as ‘she leaves’ +<shifting ofthe left hand towards the left side >, indicating the direction of thedisplacement; this annotation only concerns the representationalgestures.

(iii) Supplements: the information brought by the gesture adds newinformation not coded in the linguistic content, as ‘he tries to comeout’ +<vertical agitation of the hand>to represent the baby birdmoving inside the egg.

(iv) Complements: the information provided by the gesture bringsa necessary complement to the incomplete linguistic informationprovided by the verbal message: the gesture disambiguates the message,as when a pointing gesture accompanies a location adverb like ‘here’,‘there’.

(v) Contradicts: the information provided by the gesture contradictsthe linguistic information provided by the verbal message: pointingto the right while talking about the left direction; displaying the facialexpression of anger while using soft words to describe a person’sbehavior or attitude.

(vi) Substitutes: the information provided by the gesture replaces linguisticinformation as nodding in affirmative response.

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ILLUSTRATION OF THE CODING SYSTEM

The figure shows an extract from an annotated file on ELAN (French data,interviewer sitting on the left on the media window, child sitting on theright): words of the child (first track), annotated gestures (phrase and stroke,function, relation to speech respectively on second, third, and fourth track),and annotated speech (clauses on sixth track, words on eighth track, connec-tives and anaphoric marks on tenth track).

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