2018 Friday Poster 6619

Friday, November 2, 2018 | Poster Session I, Metcalf Small | 3pm

Do Parents Gesture Differently to their Bilingual Children When Speaking their Dominant vs. Weaker Language?
V. Limia, S. Ozcaliskan, E. Hoff, E. Alcantar, M. Ortiz, C. Chamorro

Bilingual children develop each of their languages at an uneven pace and produce a greater number and variety of words in their dominant language (Hoff et al., 2012)—a pattern that also becomes evident in their co-speech gestures. More specifically, bilingual children produce greater numbers of the more complex iconic gestures (i.e., gestures that characterize objects; e.g., flap arms for bird) when speaking their dominant language and greater amounts of the relatively simpler deictic gestures (i.e., gestures that indicate objects; e.g., point at bird) when speaking their weaker language (Nicoladis, 2002). The informational relation of these gestures to bilingual children’s speech remains still unknown, namely whether children use them to further reinforce what they already convey in speech (i.e., complementary gesture+speech; e.g., “bird”+point at bird) or add new information not found in speech (i.e., supplementary gesture+speech; e.g., “mine” + flap arms for bird). We know that parents provided models for the types of gestures and gesture + speech combinations for their monolingual children (Özçalışkan & Dimitrova, 2013). However, we do not yet know whether bilingual children’s patterns of gesture production also reflect the parental gesture input they receive and if so, how this input might differ in the child’s two languages. In this study, we ask whether children show differences in the types of gestures and gesture-speech combinations that they produce when speaking their weaker vs. dominant language, and, if so, whether these differences reflect the gestural input they receive from their parents in each language.

We examine these questions by observing 34 English-Spanish bilingual (17 English-Dominant; 17 Spanish-Dominant) children at age 2;6, as they interacted with their parents in a 30-minute structured play context, collected as part of a larger project (Hoff, 2018). Children interacted with their parents twice, once in English and once in Spanish, on separate days. We coded the types of gestures parents and children produced as deictic, iconic, or conventional (e.g., nod for yes). Each gesture was further coded for the relation it held to the accompanying speech, as complementary or supplementary.

First looking at child gesture use, we found that bilingual children did not show dominance differences for gesture type (deictic, iconic, conventional; p = .32) but tended to do so for gesture+speech type, producing greater number of supplementary combinations (p = .06) in their dominant language. Turning next to parent gesture use, we found no effect of dominance for gesture-type (p = .41) or for gesture-speech combinations (p = .58). Importantly, parents’ use of supplementary gesture-speech combinations was positively correlated with their children’s production of supplementary gesture-speech combinations (F = 11.33, p < .01; R2 = .24)—but only in the child’s dominant language.

Our results suggest that patterns of gesture production remain largely similar in bilingual children’s two languages—with the only exception of supplementary gesture speech combinations—and reflect the patterns in parent gesture input. Bilingual children tend to use gesture more to extend their communicative repertoire in their dominant language—a pattern that is also predicted by parental gesture input.

References

Hoff, E., Core, C., Place, S., Rumiche, R., Señor, M., & Parra, M. (2012). Dual language exposure and early bilingual development. Journal of child language, 39(1), 1-27.

Nicoladis, E. (2002). Some gestures develop in conjunction with spoken language development and others don’t: Evidence from bilingual preschoolers. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 26(4), 241-266.

Özçalışkan, S. & Dimitrova, N.(2013). How Gesture Input Provides a Helping Hand to Language Development. Seminars in speech and language. 34. 227-36. DOI: 10.1055/s-0033-1353447.