BCCCD22

Slack: https://bcccd.slack.com/archives/C02PSCS4M9A

Sara Muñoz-Coego, Júlia Florit-Pons, Patrick Louis Rohrer, Ingrid Vilà-Giménez, Pilar Prieto
1 Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
2 Université de Nantes, UMR 6310 Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes (LLING), Nantes, France
3 Department of Subject-Specific Education, Universitat de Girona, Girona, Catalonia, Spain
4 Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona, Catalonia

Developmental studies have suggested that children aged 3 to 7 use prosodic prominence to mark referents in discourse based on their information status, such that new and accessible (i.e., new to the hearer but inferable through the context) referents tend to be accented while given (i.e., old) referents are usually deaccented. However, little information is available about how children use other multimodal cues, such as gestures (both referential and non-referential), in referent marking. Therefore, this study aims to longitudinally assess how children use these multimodal cues to distinguish the information status of referents in narrative discourse.

Using a longitudinal database of 83 children performing a narrative retelling task at two time points in development (at 5-6 and 7-9; Vilà-Giménez et al., 2021), 332 videos were coded for gesture referentiality (referential/non-referential), information status of referents (new/given/accessible), and prosodic prominence (pitch-accented/deaccented).

Preliminary results showed that by age 5 children introduced new referents gesturally and prosodically. Also, our findings indicated that while 5- to 9-year-old children introduced given referents without gestural and prosodic markings, accessible referents tended to be marked prosodically, but not gesturally. Interestingly, we observed that at 7-9, children used non-referential gestures significantly more than referential gestures to mark new referents. These results suggest that while these multimodal cues develop in parallel, children at 7-9 are sensitive to referents that should be in the common knowledge yet have not been explicitly referenced, and choose to mark them prosodically rather than gesturally.

• Session 5, Wednesday, 12 Jan, 07:00 - 08:30 (UTC +0)
• Session 6, Wednesday, 12 Jan, 13:00 - 14:30 (UTC +0)