Abstract
This study compares words and gestures produced in a controlled experimental setting by children raised in different linguistic/cultural environments to examine the robustness of gesture use at an early stage of lexical development. Twenty-two Italian and twenty-two Japanese toddlers (age range 25–37 months) performed the same picture-naming task. Italians produced more spoken correct labels than Japanese but a similar amount of representational gestures temporally matched with words. However, Japanese gestures reproduced more closely the action represented in the picture. Results confirm that gestures are linked to motor actions similarly for all children, suggesting a common developmental stage, only minimally influenced by culture.
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Notes
All glosses for representational gestures are reported in small capitals following a convention adopted in many studies on children’s gestures.
In a gesture we can distinguish essentially three phases: Preparation (optional): The limb moves away from the rest position into the gesture space where it can begin the stroke. Stroke (obligatory in the sense that absent a stroke, a gesture is not said to occur): The stroke is the gesture phase with meaning; it is also a phase with effort, in the dance notation sense of focused energy. Retraction (optional): The hands return to rest (not always the same position as at the start) (McNeill 2005).
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Acknowledgments
The work reported in this paper was partially supported by the Fondazione Monte di Parma (Research Group for Study on Children’s Motor and Language Development, University of Parma), by a national research grant PRIN 2008—2008J2WEEK (“Gestures and language in children with atypical and at risk developmental profiles: relationships among competences, mother–child interaction modalities and proposals of intervention”) and the “Executive programme of cooperation in the field of Science and Technology between Italy and Japan” of the Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Italy. We are very grateful to Marianne Gullberg for her insightful suggestions on an early presentation of the study and to Aliyah Morgerstern, Paula Marentette and Laura Sparaci for helpful comments on previous versions of this manuscript. We especially thank the children who participated in the study, their parents and schools.
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Pettenati, P., Sekine, K., Congestrì, E. et al. A Comparative Study on Representational Gestures in Italian and Japanese Children. J Nonverbal Behav 36, 149–164 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-011-0127-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-011-0127-0