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The relationship between early gestures and intonation

Wayne State University, hbalog{at}wayne.edu

Diane Brentari

Purdue University

Pragmatic language skills (e.g., communicative intention) have traditionally been difficult to measure consistently in young children. This challenge makes it difficult to establish links between early productive speech/ language behaviors (e.g., intonation) and communicative intentions, which may prove to be useful for early diagnosis of speech and language impairment. The current study proposes a methodology for observing and measuring language produced by children in the single-word developmental stage that does not rely on usual linguistic cues (e.g., lexical meaning). The goals of this study were: (1) to determine whether young children (i.e., ages 1;0—1;11) coordinated their nonverbal and verbal behavior directions; and (2) to determine whether there were any into-national and intentional differences between utterances produced with coordination compared with those produced without coordination. Our findings suggest that, even at the one-word stage of language acquisition, young children are beginning to adhere to the adult tendency to coordinate nonverbal and verbal behaviors, and that intentional meaning is more comprehensible when gesture and intonation contour are coordinated.

Key Words: Gestures • intentional communication • intonation • single-word stage • toddlers

First Language, Vol. 28, No. 2, 141-163 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0142723708088722


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