Static and dynamic space: Verbal-gestural description of place and route in children

Résumé En

The category of Space is one of the most crucial ontological categories. Its importance andcomplexity has long been nourishing the interest in how people understand, represent andexpress different spatial situations and events. The present study investigated both static anddynamic space (place and route) in the context of multimodal oral descriptions (speech andco-speech gesture) and from a developmental perspective (three age groups). Our approach isanchored in gesture-speech theoretical framework (e.g. McNeill 1992) and inspired bygesture-space empirical studies (e.g. Cassell, Stone, & Yan 2000; Emmorey, Tversky, &Taylor 2001).The participants are 32 typically developing children aged 6-7, 8-9, 10-11 years. Datacollection took place in their school during individual sessions. Each child was asked todescribe his/her classroom (Experiment 1) and the route from the school entrance to thecourtyard (Experiment 2), a counterbalanced design being applied. Oral descriptions werevideotaped, then transcribed and annotated in ELAN.Focusing on different variables, we formulated six main questions.1) Gesture form: What types of gesture appear in place/route descriptions? E.g. drawingiconic, modeling iconic, abstract deictic…2) Verbal and gestural reference: Which elements of a given place/route are mentioned inspeech and which ones are depicted in simultaneously produced gesture? E.g. motion,landmark, activity…3) Verbal and gestural content: What characteristics of a given place/route element areprovided verbally and what characteristics are represented gesturally? E.g. trajectory,location, shape…4) Frame of reference: What perspective is adopted when speaking and gesturing about agiven place/route? Typically, egocentric versus allocentric.5) Gesture-speech semantic relation: Do speech and gesture convey the same informationabout a given place/route?6) Effect of age: How does multimodal description of place/route develop in children?The results will be presented and discussed in light of current knowledge of gesture-speechrelations and spatial language/cognition development.Cassell, J., Stone, M., & Yan, H. (2000). Coordination and Context-Dependence in the Generation of EmbodiedConversation. Paper presented at the INLG 2000, Mitzpe Ramon, Israel.Emmorey, K., Tversky, B., & Taylor, H. A. (2001). Using space to describe space: Perspective in speech, sign,and gesture. Spatial Cognition and Computation, 00, 1- 24.McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. Chicago, IL/London, UK: TheUniversity of Chicago Press.