Non-referential beat gestures as a window onto the development of children’s narrative abilities
Co-speech gestures are children’s first path towards communication. Further in development, research has primarily focused on the role of iconic gestures in boosting children’s narrative abilities, while less is known about the effects of nonreferential gestures. The main goal of this PhD dissertati...
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| Formato: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2020 |
| País: | España |
| Recursos: | CBUC, CESCA |
| Repositorio: | TDR. Tesis Doctorales en Red |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:www.tdx.cat:10803/669319 |
| Acesso em linha: | http://hdl.handle.net/10803/669319 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palavra-chave: | Beat gestures Development Children's narrative abilities Gestos de la parla Habilitats narratives Gestos del habla Habilidades narrativas 81 |
| Resumo: | Co-speech gestures are children’s first path towards communication. Further in development, research has primarily focused on the role of iconic gestures in boosting children’s narrative abilities, while less is known about the effects of nonreferential gestures. The main goal of this PhD dissertation is to investigate the scaffolding role of non-referential beat gestures (i.e., rhythmic hand movements that are associated with prosodic prominence in oral discourse) in the development of oral narrative abilities in children. Given the fact that beat gestures act as highlighters of linguistic properties such as rhythm, information focus or discourse structure, we hypothesize that these gestures can help children frame discourse. In order to test this general hypothesis, this thesis includes three empirical studies ––each one described in a separate chapter. Study 1 is a longitudinal study which analyzes the speech and gestures produced by 45 14- to 58-month-old children in naturalistic interactions with their caregivers. Results show that the early production of beats, as opposed to the production of iconic gestures and hand flip gestures (i.e., non-referential gestures performed by turning the wrist of the hand), predicts later narrative abilities at 5 years of age. The other two studies (Study 2 and Study 3) use a between-subjects narrative training task with a pretest–posttest design to investigate whether non-referential beat gestures can be key in bolstering narrative discourse performance in a total of 91 5- to 6-year-old children. While the first study examines whether multimodal training in which children observe beat gestures can contribute to improving their narrative performance in terms of narrative structure, the second study analyzes whether training which encourages children to produce beat gestures ––as opposed to merely observing them–– can have the same effects in terms of narrative structure and fluency. The results of both studies demonstrate that children who observed beat gestures during training (Study 2) and children who were encouraged to produce them (Study 3) showed a significant gain in the quality of their posttest narrative performance as opposed to children who were exposed to the control conditions. Altogether, the results of the abovementioned studies show the importance of a less-studied gesture in children’s language development, i.e., beat gesture, and how this type of non-referential gesture has a strong link to children’s narrative development. While results from the Study 1 demonstrate the predictive role of beats in children’s later narrative abilities, results from Studies 2 and 3 reveal the essential role of training with beat gestures for short-term improvement in children’s narrative discourse performance. Moreover, these findings are relevant not only to understand the value of the multimodal integration between gesture and speech in child development, but also have important methodological implications for teachers and speech therapists working on narrative abilities. |
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