Paper for “Gesture: the Living Medium” conference, June 5-8, 2002, University of Texas-Austin.
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Speech-gesture synchrony in preschooler-adult
discourse: a case study (1) |
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Brad Belbas belba002@umn.edu |
Amy Sheldon |
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University of Minnesota |
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Overview |
| We will discuss how speech and gesture are co-expressed by a three-and-one-half-year-old native English speaker, who is talking spontaneously with her uncle. The child is proposing to the uncle a plan for a future event, but she is unclear about some of the spatial and temporal details that would make it work. We will describe the organization of her speech and gestures when she first proposes the plan; both modalities express some uncertainty. After her uncle indicates that her plan could work and clarifies details that she doesn’t know, she constructs an enhanced repeat. |
| We will compare how expression in both the linguistic and spatial modalities change in her enhanced repeat. Our data and analysis supports McNeill’s claim (1992) that “Speech and gesture are elements of a single integrated process of utterance formation in which there is synthesis of…instantaneous imagery with…verbalization”. |
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View
video clip of whole conversationData and Analysis |
| The family is eating brownies in the kitchen. Uncle Somers (foreground left) is visiting from out of state. The parents and baby sister are in the background. |
| The three-year-old, Susannah, has been encouraged to show her uncle a fragile piece of sculpture that she made as a gift to his brother, Uncle Garrett. She trepidatiously brings it over to show Somers (a professional sculptor). He admires it. |
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| In lines 004-005, Somers’ words and clasped hand gesture show that he understands that this is a gift for someone else. In lines 006-017, Susannah thinks up and proposes a plan for Somers to give the gift to Uncle Garrett sometime in the future when Somers goes back home and the uncles meet. |
| Uncle Garrett is not present, and Susannah is not clear about where exactly, he is. So she is also not clear about the details of how Uncle Somers would get the gift to Garrett. In video slow motion (see link to video clip above) we see that she articulates this future event with a series of gestures that reflect her difficulties in thinking about the place where the gift can be transferred to Garrett, by Somers. |
| Susannah’s co-expression of speech and gesture in the first formulation of her plan is marked by speech disfluencies. There are false starts in lines 006 (…you can-), 007 (…you can-), 009 (you can-), 011 (to Tenn-), and 016 (to his-). The restart in line 017 (to Santa Fe), is a lexical self-correction. |
| Susannah’s linguistic production is accompanied by a series of gestures. Some of them reflect her uncertainty about where the gift will be transferred. This may have added to the difficulties of formulating a plan: a thinking face (line 011), hands held apart in a wide conduit gesture (line 011), gaze aversion while thinking up the plan (line 009), nonspecific hand circles (line 013). One salient gesture indexes the gift transfer (lines 014-017), a broad sweep of her hands from her right (at your house) across her body to her left side (to his house), at which point she returns her gaze to Somers. |
| Uncle Somers’ contribution |
| Uncle Somers agrees to her plan. He helps her by explaining details of time and space. |
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| Somers affirms that Susannah’s plan will work. He reveals Garrett’s current location (California), when he and Garrett will meet (on Garrett’s way back to Tennesee), and where he and Garrett will meet (in Santa Fe). His hands are occupied with the sculpture, so he uses his (shiny bald) head in side-to-side tilts to point to gestural space. He keeps the same spatial locations that Susannah introduced for his house and Garrett’s house. Like her, he locates his own house on her right (his left); he locates Garrett’s house on Susannah’s left (his right). Then, he adds new information, relocating Garrett in Santa Fe where he will come to visit at Somers’ house, again, on his left (Susannah’s right). |
| Enhanced repeat |
| Susannah now understands how Somers and Garrett could meet up (out of state) so that the gift can be delivered. She incorporates what Somers tells her in a more rapid reformulation of a more precise plan, adding constructed dialogue that dramatically enacts the future event. Her co-expression of speech and gesture is more streamlined. |
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Discussion |
| The catchment |
| The two-handed, right-to-left sweep across Susannah’s body in the first plan (…have it at your house and take it home to his-) is repeated in Susannah’s reformulation (‘it’s from Susannah it’s for you’). McNeill (1992) calls this a “catchment”, i.e., “a recurring image which suggests a common discourse theme”. |
| This repeated image of transfer, symbolizes Susannah’s primary discourse intent, i.e., to give Somers instructions for delivering her gift to Garrett. The catchment is a cohering link between Susannah’s first and second instructions. |
| Her enhanced repeat has none of the prior gestures or gaze aversion and fewer linguistic disfluencies that seem to be associated with her uncertainty, or the need to think for speaking. We put video clips of her hand motions in the original formulation and the enhanced repeat side by side (see links below). You can see that the main gesture, a sweeping motion of both hands from her right side, where she has located Somers, to her left, where she located Garrett, is re-expressed in a more streamlined way in the enhanced repeat. For example, gone are the thinking face and arms that were held momentarily while she thought through her plan for the first time, uncertain about where the transference will take place. Also in the enhanced repeat, there are greater economies of speech and co-expressed gesture and gaze. |
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| Some comparative measures between Susannah’s first plan and her reformulation are given in Table 1. |
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| The enhanced repeat has about two-thirds of the number of words as the first formulation and is a little more than half as long. We believe this reflects greater clarity in Susannah’s thinking for speaking and increased efficiencies in expressing thought. There are other efficiencies in the enhanced repeat: |
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| Speech and gesture were co-expressive during Susannah's initial formulation as well as in her enhanced repeat. Speech and gesture appear to be synchronous when the clip is viewed at 50% speed, i.e., there is no noticeable asynchronicity. |
Conclusion |
| The digital environment has allowed us to closely examine a spontaneous, mundane family conversation. We describe how a three-year-old child’s speech is coordinated in discourse with her uncle’s. The references that she establishes in gesture space are used by her uncle, and then reused by her in a reformulated plan. Her speech (and her uncle’s) is systematically organized and co-expressive with her gesture as she plots locations, events, and temporal perspectives of present and future in gesture space. |
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have demonstrated that a three-year-old has already achieved a high degree of competence in co-expressing speech and gesture, and that her discourse examples support McNeill’s claim that “Speech and gesture are elements of a single integrated process of utterance formation in which there is synthesis of…instantaneous imagery with…verbalization”. |
Acknowledgments |
| We have benefited from discussing this research with David McNeill, Susan Duncan, Gene Lerner and participants in the Seminar on Language and the Body at University of California-Santa Barbara in Spring, 2002. We alone are responsible for any infelicities herein. |
Notes |
| (1) Authors’ names are listed alphabetically. |
References |
McNeill, D. 1992. Hand and mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
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A longer version of this paper will be posted at |