Grup d'Estudis de Prosòdia, Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.
Department of Subject-Specific Education, Universitat de Girona, Catalonia, Spain.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2023 Mar 7;66(3):888-900. doi: 10.1044/2022_JSLHR-22-00451. Epub 2023 Feb 21.
This study aims to analyze the development of gesture-speech temporal alignment patterns in children's narrative speech from a longitudinal perspective and, specifically, the potential differences between different gesture types, namely, gestures that imagistically portray or refer to semantic content in speech (i.e., referential gestures) and those that lack semantic content (i.e., non-referential gestures).
This study uses an audiovisual corpus of narrative productions ( = 332) from 83 children (43 girls, 40 boys) who participated in a narrative retelling task at two time points in development (at 5-6 and 7-9 years of age). The 332 narratives were coded for both manual co-speech gesture types and prosody. Gestural annotations included gesture phasing (i.e., preparation, stroke, hold, and recovery) and gesture types (in terms of referentiality, i.e., referential and non-referential), whereas prosodic annotations included pitch-accented syllables.
Results revealed that by ages 5-6 years, children already temporally aligned the stroke of both referential and non-referential gestures with pitch-accented syllables, showing no significant differences between these two gesture types.
The results of the present study contribute to the view that both referential and non-referential gestures are aligned with pitch accentuation, and therefore, this is not only a characteristic of non-referential gestures. Our results also add support to McNeill's phonological synchronization rule from a developmental perspective and indirectly back up recent theories about the biomechanics of gesture-speech alignment, suggesting that this is an inherent ability of oral communication.
本研究旨在从纵向角度分析儿童叙事言语中手势-言语时间对准模式的发展，特别是不同手势类型之间的潜在差异，即，形象地描绘或指代言语中语义内容的手势（即，有指意的手势）和缺乏语义内容的手势（即，无指意的手势）。
本研究使用了一个视听语料库，其中包含 83 名儿童（43 名女孩，40 名男孩）在两个发展时间点（5-6 岁和 7-9 岁）参与叙事复述任务时的叙事产生物（=332）。对 332 个叙事进行了手动共言语手势类型和韵律的编码。手势注释包括手势分相（即准备、笔画、保持和恢复）和手势类型（在指意性方面，即有指意和无指意），而韵律注释包括重读音节。
结果表明，到 5-6 岁时，儿童已经将有指意和无指意手势的笔画与重读音节进行了时间对准，这两种手势类型之间没有显著差异。
本研究的结果有助于以下观点，即有指意和无指意手势都与重读音节对准，因此，这不仅是无指意手势的特征。我们的结果还从发展的角度支持了麦克尼尔的语音同步规则，并间接地支持了最近关于手势-言语对准的生物力学理论，表明这是口头交际的一种固有能力。
