Why Children Turn Pictures : A multimodal interaction analysis of children performing the Picture Naming Game

The purpose of this thesis is to give a detailed account of gesture and movement phenomena observed in children. The analysis method is multimodal interaction analysis, otherwise known as Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis (EMCA). The analysis is based on children performing the Picture Naming Game (PiNG), a vocabulary test for young children. During the PiNG, the researcher will place printed pictures in front of the child, and the child is tasked with naming the de- picted object. The central phenomenon discovered and analysed with multimodal interaction analysis in this thesis was that the children would occasionally pick up a picture and turn it around. These children’s turning movements are generally anal- ysed as being fidgets, and possibly related to increased cognitive taxation, or, seen as social, and part of a metaphoric gesture shared with the researcher. Addition- ally, the researcher’s interactions are also examined. The researcher uses additional prompts as interactional tools during the PiNG, and four types of such prompts are identified, each with gestural and verbal counterparts. Some proposals for future research that would complement this current thesis are offered, and finally some ideas for future research inspired by this thesis are discussed.