Multimodal negation in speaking children

International audienceThis research examines the development of negation in children’s language and documents the combined use of speech and gesture in this process. After pointing, manual gestures of agreement and refusal are the first symbolic forms used by children and precede children’s first negative constructions in spoken language development (Clark, 1978). This paper asks if such gestures facilitate the development of negation in speech and what is the process of change that the multimodal system undergoes during the language acquisition process?In order to trace the transitions between action, gesture and speech, we analyzed all the communicative productions of four monolingual children from the ages of 0;10 to 4;0. We coded the differences between actions (e.g. pushing away, avoiding), and negative conventional gestures (headshakes, shrugs etc.). We analyzed a) the combined ‘redundant’ use of gestures and words; b) the use of each modality in isolation; c) the re-introduction of co-verbal gestures after speech only productions. We also coded the first functions of negations, their order of emergence and their forms in different modalities from the very beginning of our data.The results show that the four children use the two modalities throughout the data collection period for all functions of negation, but with great individual differences in how they combine modalities. Moreover, the children’s use of negative gestures has a limited range of meanings and is executed with only slight variations during the acquisition process in contrast to more variable adult uses (Kendon 2002). The visual-gestural modality returns in all four children’s data with the production of more diversified co-verbal gestures when speech is more elaborate. Despite marked individual and cultural differences, the four children’s use of gestures in negative contexts signals the blossoming of progressively more complex multimodal communication skills