gestures and prosody

[Jana M. Iverson]

Hi Jeff,

A group of Italian colleagues and I recently did a study in which we looked
at the frequency of maternal gesture use as mothers interacted with their
16- and 20-month-old children in naturalistic, in-home play sessions.  We
found that only 10% of all maternal utterances were accompanied by gesture,
that the vast majority of gestures were points at concrete objects, and
that frequency of maternal gesture did not change across the children's 16
and 20 month sessions (i.e., maternal gesture production did not decline as
children's vocal language skills improved).  Interestingly, another
unpublished study that looked at American mothers' use of gesture during
interactions with their 18-month-olds also reported that 10% of maternal
utterances occurred with gesture.

Marilyn Shatz also did some work a few years ago looking at the
relationship between speech and gesture in maternal speech to young
children.  Here are some references that might be helpful.

Iverson, J.M., Capirci, O., Longobardi, E., & Caselli, M.C. (in press).
Gesturing in mother-child interactions.  Cognitive Development.

Bekken, K. (1989).  Is there motherese in gesture?  Unpublished doctoral
dissertation, The University of Chicago.

Shatz, M. (1982).  On mechanisms of language acquisition: Can features of
the communicative environment account for development?  In E. Wanner & L.
Gleitman (Eds.), Language acquisition: The state of the art (pp. 102-127).
New York: Cambridge University Press.

Best,
Jana Iverson





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Jana M. Iverson                         Phone:  (812) 855-0817
Dept. of Psychology                     Fax:  (812) 855-4691
1101 E. 10th St.                        Email:  jiverson at indiana.edu
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN  47405
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