Past Event

Conventionality in children’s speech-coordinated gestures

Dr. Mats Andrén, Sweden
toolsforscholars.com/research/

The presentation is divided into a conceptual part and an empirical part. In the first part some distinctions will be presented that are useful for talking about conventionality in gesture, and this will serve as an introduction to the topic. The second part consists of a discussion of empirical findings from my research on children’s use of conventionalized gestures in coordination with speech. I have found that children first tend to use conventionalized gestures together with particular spoken words and expressions, and that this is followed by a developmental progression to increasingly more flexible and productive coordination with speech. To deal with these observations, I make use of the concept of multimodal constructions (Andrén 2010; 2015), as an extension of usage-based approaches to language learning and theories of construction grammar to also include gesture. These ideas have consequences for the (meta-)theoretical question of whether gesture can be said to be part of language or not, and in what sense.

About the Presenter

Mats Andrén is a Swedish researcher with a background in Linguistics, Cognitive Science and studies of social interaction. His main area is the study of human gesture in everyday life contexts, with a special interest in children’s gestures. His PhD thesis (Andrén 2010) has the title “Children’s Gestures from 18 to 30 months” and presents both a general semiotic framework for characterizing gesture as well as empirical findings on children’s use of gesture and how gesture development relates to language development. Most of his later research builds further on these topics, with only the occasional detour to other areas such as children’s laughter and audio description for the blind.

This event is sponsored by the School of Linguistics and Language Studies