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Motoric characteristics of representational gestures produced by young children in a naming task*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 November 2009

PAOLA PETTENATI ,
SILVIA STEFANINI  and
VIRGINIA VOLTERRA
PAOLA PETTENATI*
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Neuroscienze, Università di Parma, Italy
SILVIA STEFANINI
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Neuroscienze, Università di Parma, Italy
VIRGINIA VOLTERRA
Affiliation:
Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy
*
Address for correspondence: Paola Pettenati, Dipartimento di Neuroscienze, Università di Parma, via Volturno 39/E 43100 Parma. e-mail: paola.pettenati@nemo.unipr.it
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Abstract

This study explores the form of representational gestures produced by forty-five hearing children (age range 2 ; 0–3 ; 1) asked to label pictures in words. Five pictures depicting objects and five pictures depicting actions which elicited more representational gestures were chosen for more detailed analysis. The range of gestures produced for each item varied from 3 to 27 for a total of 128 gestures. Gestures have been analyzed with the same parameters used to describe signs produced by deaf children: handshape, location and movement. Results show that gestures for a given picture exhibit similarities in many of the parameters across children. Some motor characteristics found in the production of hearing toddlers' gestures are similar to those described for early signs. Implications of this similarity between gestural and signed linguistic representations in young children are discussed.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , September 2010 , pp. 887 - 911
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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Footnotes

[*]

The work reported in this paper was supported by the Fondazione Monte di Parma (Research Group for Study on Children's Motor and Language Development, University of Parma). We are very grateful to the participants of the Nascent Languages Conference, Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio, Italy, 4–8 October 2006) for their insightful suggestions on an early presentation of the study. We thank Elena Congestrì for her collaboration in data transcription, Penny Boyes-Braem, Tommaso Russo and Bencie Woll for their helpful comments on previous versions of this manuscript, and Aldo Di Domenico for figures drawing. We especially thank the children who participated in the study, their parents and their schools. Author contributions: VV conceived The idea; SS designed the setting and collected the data; PP analyzed the data; PP, SS VV wrote the paper.

References

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