A multimodal approach to the development of negation in signed and spoken languages: Four case studies

International audienceIn this study, we address the expression of negation in four longitudinal studies including 1) Madeleine, a hearing child in multimodal French interactions, 2) Ellie, a hearing child in multimodal English interactions; 3) Charlotte, a deaf child of deaf parents in mono-modal LSF interactions, 4) Illana, a child with one deaf, one hearing parent in bimodal bilingual (French-LSF) interactions. All the negative utterances including French, English or LSF, symbolic gestures and actions, were coded and analysed between 12 and 36 months for the four children.We draw the four pathways to illustrate how each child combines symbolic categories and visual/aural modalities in successive steps with respect to her own linguistic environment: Madeleine and Ellie use gestures less as they enter verbal negation but keep using the gestural cues when necessary or for emphasis. Charlotte uses more and more manual and non-manual combinations including co-verbal gestures and LSF items. Illana uses fewer French or LSF negations than her monolingual peers but she exploits a wide range of bimodal combinations. She is always aware of the visual information she has to maintain in her output.We focus on PalmUp-Shrug and IndexWave gestures and underline systematic properties at the junction between co-verbal gestures and signs. To do so, we show a) their contrastive physiological patterns, and b) their semantic and pragmatic value for the expression of negation