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Non-verbal Behavior and Its Role in Narrative Production

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Language, Music and Gesture: Informational Crossroads

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Abstract

Mastering the skills of the interpretation of non-verbal behavior takes up all childhood. The factors that influence the explicit representation of characters’ non-verbal behavior in narratives were determined based on the analysis of unprepared oral stories by 125 Russian-native monolingual children aged from 4 years 7 months to 7 years 6 months and a control group of 19 Russian-native adults. These factors are the meaning of non-verbal acts, their importance for the plot progress and their dependence on the presence or absence of speech context. When representing a non-verbal act within the framework of an unprepared retelling, Russian speakers use any of the following strategies: describing the non-verbal act, interpreting it, identifying a situation that it can correspond to, or reproducing a possible speech context. Failure to perceive a non-verbal act results in either omitting or misinterpreting it. With the development of communication skills, the number of such failures clearly decreases. Russian-speaking preschool children recognize non-verbal behavior presented without a speech context, but tend to better interpret the episodes that are significant for the plot progress and, thus, perform a connecting function. In contrast to the narrative significant non-verbal acts, communicative non-verbal acts require a speech context and were less frequently present in the analyzed narratives, especially in the ones produced by younger children.

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Acknowledgements

The work is supported by the research grant number 20-012-00290 from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research.

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  1. St Petersburg University, Universitetskaya nab., 11, 190000, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

    Polina Eismont

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  1. Polina Eismont
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Correspondence to Polina Eismont .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. St Petersburg University, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

    Tatiana Chernigovskaya

  2. St Petersburg University, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

    Polina Eismont

  3. St Petersburg University, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

    Tatiana Petrova

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Eismont, P. (2021). Non-verbal Behavior and Its Role in Narrative Production. In: Chernigovskaya, T., Eismont, P., Petrova, T. (eds) Language, Music and Gesture: Informational Crossroads. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-3742-1_8

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