Gesture And Multimodal Development

Brings together studies from language acquisition and developmental psychology. This title addresses topics such as: gesture use in prelinguistic infants with a focus on pointing, the relationship between gestures and lexical development in typically developing and deaf children and even how gesture can help to learn mathematics

We gesture while we talk and children use gestures prior to words to communicate during the first year. Later, as words become the preferred form of communication, children continue to gesture to reinforce or extend the spoken messages or even to replace them. This volume, originally published as a Special Issue of Gesture 10:2/3 (2010), brings together studies from language acquisition and developmental psychology. It provides a review of common theoretical, methodological and empirical themes, and the contributions address topics such as gesture use in prelinguistic infants with a special and new focus on pointing, the relationship between gestures and lexical development in typically developing and deaf children and even how gesture can help to learn mathematics. All in all, it brings additional evidence on how gestures are related to language, communication and mind development.

Through constant exposure to adult input in interaction, children’s language gradually develops into rich linguistic constructions containing multiple cross-modal elements subtly used together for communicative functions. Sensorimotor schemas provide the "grounding" of language in experience and lead to children’s access to the symbolic function. With the emergence of vocal or signed productions, gestures do not disappear but remain functional and diversify in form and function as children become skilled adult multimodal conversationalists. This volume examines the role of gesture over the human lifespan in its complex interaction with speech and sign. Gesture is explored in the different stages before, during, and after language has fully developed and a special focus is placed on the role of gesture in language learning and cognitive development. Specific chapters are devoted to the use of gesture in atypical populations. CONTENTS Contributors Aliyah Morgenstern and Susan Goldin-Meadow 1 Introduction to Gesture in Language Part I: An Emblematic Gesture: Pointing Kensy Cooperrider and Kate Mesh 2 Pointing in Gesture and Sign Aliyah Morgenstern 3 Early Pointing Gestures Part II: Gesture Before Speech Meredith L. Rowe, Ran Wei, and Virginia C. Salo 4 Early Gesture Predicts Later Language Development Olga Capirci, Maria Cristina Caselli, and Virginia Volterra 5 Interaction Among Modalities and Within Development Part III: Gesture With Speech During Language Learning Eve V. Clark and Barbara F. Kelly 6 Constructing a System of Communication With Gestures and Words Pauline Beaupoil-Hourdel 7 Embodying Language Complexity: Co-Speech Gestures Between Age 3 and 4 Casey Hall, Elizabeth Wakefield, and Susan Goldin-Meadow 8 Gesture Can Facilitate Children’s Learning and Generalization of Verbs Part IV: Gesture After Speech Is Mastered Jean-Marc Colletta 9 On the Codevelopment of Gesture and Monologic Discourse in Children Susan Wagner Cook 10 Understanding How Gestures Are Produced and Perceived Tilbe Göksun, Demet Özer, and Seda AkbIyık 11 Gesture in the Aging Brain Part V: Gesture With More Than One Language Elena Nicoladis and Lisa Smithson 12 Gesture in Bilingual Language Acquisition Marianne Gullberg 13 Bimodal Convergence: How Languages Interact in Multicompetent Language Users’ Speech and Gestures Gale Stam and Marion Tellier 14 Gesture Helps Second and Foreign Language Learning and Teaching Aliyah Morgenstern and Susan Goldin-Meadow Afterword: Gesture as Part of Language or Partner to Language Across the Lifespan Index About the Editors

What is gesture and what does it do? What is the meaning of multimodality? What do these concepts signify within the different theoretical approaches to interaction and communication among human beings? Why do we study gesture and multimodality? The thirteen chapters that make up this volume provide answers to these questions. They bring together an eclectic set of recent studies on visible bodily actions conducted by junior and senior researchers and are a testimony to the curiosity and vitality that have always distinguished gesture studies. This young yet rapidly growing field investigates the semiotic features of gesture in relation to speech as integral parts of utterances, the different uses of gestures with and without speech, such as gestures in language acquisition, gestures in the performing arts (music, dance, theatre) and gestures in Artificial Intelligence.

Research on the multifaceted aspects of modeling, analysis, and synthesis of - man gesture is receiving growing interest from both the academic and industrial communities. On one hand, recent scienti?c developments on cognition, on - fect/emotion, on multimodal interfaces, and on multimedia have opened new perspectives on the integration of more sophisticated models of gesture in c- putersystems.Ontheotherhand,theconsolidationofnewtechnologiesenabling “disappearing” computers and (multimodal) interfaces to be integrated into the natural environments of users are making it realistic to consider tackling the complex meaning and subtleties of human gesture in multimedia systems, - abling a deeper, user-centered, enhanced physical participation and experience in the human-machine interaction process. The research programs supported by the European Commission and s- eral national institutions and governments individuated in recent years strategic ?elds strictly concerned with gesture research. For example, the DG Infor- tion Society of the European Commission (www.cordis.lu/ist) supports several initiatives, such as the “Disappearing Computer” and “Presence” EU-IST FET (Future and Emerging Technologies), the IST program “Interfaces & Enhanced Audio-Visual Services” (see for example the project MEGA, Multisensory - pressive Gesture Applications, www.megaproject.org), and the IST strategic - jective “Multimodal Interfaces.” Several EC projects and other funded research are represented in the chapters of this book. Awiderangeofapplicationscanbene?tfromadvancesinresearchongesture, from consolidated areas such as surveillance to new or emerging ?elds such as therapy and rehabilitation, home consumer goods, entertainment, and aud- visual, cultural and artistic applications, just to mention only a few of them.

Gestures are prevalent in communication and tightly linked to language and speech. As such they can shed important light on issues of language development across the lifespan. This volume, originally published as a Special Issue of Gesture Volume 8:2 (2008), brings together studies from different disciplines that examine language development in children and adults from varying perspectives. It provides a review of common theoretical and empirical themes, and the contributions address topics such as gesture use in prelinguistic infants, the relationship between gestures and lexical development in typically and atypically developing children and in second language learners, what gestures reveal about discourse, and how all languages that adult second language speakers know can influence each other. The papers exemplify a vibrant new field of study with relevance for multiple disciplines.

Gestures are now viewed as an integral part of spoken language. But little attention has been paid to the recipients’ cognitive processes of integrating both gesture and speech. How do people understand a speaker’s gestures when inserted into gaps in the flow of speech? What cognitive-semiotic mechanisms allow this integration to occur? And what linguistic and gestural properties do people draw on when construing multimodal meaning? This book offers answers by investigating multimodal utterances in which speech is replaced by gestures. Through fine-grained cognitive-linguistic and cognitive-semiotic analyses of multimodal utterances combined with naturalistic perception experiments, six chapters explore gestures’ potential to realize grammatical notions of nouns and verbs and to integrate with speech by merging into multimodal syntactic constructions. Analyses of speech-replacing gestures and a range of related phenomena compel us to consider gestures as well as spoken and signed language as manifestations of the same conceptual system. An overarching framework is proposed for studying these different modalities together – a multimodal cognitive grammar.

Based on the International Workshop on "Multimodal Corpora: From Models of Natural Interaction to Systems and Applications", this expanded collection presents a comprehensive review of the current research in the field.