Self-repetitions and gestures in early interactions. A study of Argentinian and Spanish caregivers- toddlers dyads

ALAM FLORENCIA; CASLA, MARTA; IBAÑEZ, MARÍA ILEANA; ROSEMBERG CELIA RENATA

Madrid

Congreso; JPS; 2023

One of Child Directed Speech (CDS) main features is its repetitiousness which has been identified in different forms. Of these forms, Küntay and Slobin (1996) highlighted the use of "Variation Sets" (VS), that is, partial self-repetitions occurring in successive utterances of varying form that are addressed to children with a constant pragmatic intention. Adults’ use of VS plays diverse functions in interaction (regulating children’s actions, providing or requesting information). The use of lexical repetition in VS may help to attract and hold children's attention; this could explain why caregivers use them to persuade the child to perform, comprehend, or attend something connected to the ongoing activity (Rowe & Snow, 2020). At the same time, the alignment of the repeated sections of utterances may make it easier for the learning infant to compare such utterances and grasp the sequential relationships between words, as well as the qualities of words belonging to the same grammatical category (Onnis et al., 2021). Further studies on VS have addressed these kinds of repetitions in natural as well as quasi experimental situations (Alam et al., 2021; Onnis et al., 2021). Despite recent research arguing for the need to consider language development from a multimodal point of view (Perniss, 2018), no studies have previously analyzed the coordination between gestures and verbal utterances in VS. Considering the use of gestures in VS sequences may be particularly relevant as both VS and gestures are used by adults to attract children's attention (Iverson et al., 1999). Adults adapt the use of gestures addressed to children as they adapt their speech, and the use of these child directed gestures is related to children’s linguistic development (Rowe & Goldin-Meadow, 2019). Furthermore, the use of child directed gestures helps the adult to direct the attention of the child to some parts of the message, highlighting its form and the function (Schmidt, 1996). Thus, it seems that the functions fulfilled by VS may be similar to the functions related to the adult’s gestures directed to children. The combination of gestures and VS may even produce synergic effects. However, despite its importance, no study has previously analyzed the use of VS from a multimodal point of view, considering the gestures that may accompany the utterances that are verbally repeated. Thus, this study adopts a multimodal perspective, looking at adults’ use of gestures in VS addressed to toddlers in adult-child interactions. This work considers two urban middle income groups living in different cities (Buenos Aires, Argentina and Madrid, Spain) where different variants of Spanish are spoken. Thirty-five 18-month-old children (17 Argentinian and 18 Spanish) and their principal caregivers were video recorded for 15 minutes in spontaneous reading and playing situations.In order to analyze the relation between the use of VS and child directed gestures, we transcribed and coded  all the situations with the annotation system ELAN (Lausberg & Sloetjes, 2009). We considered the following variables related to a) speech: the number of VS b) gestures: number of speech-gesture utterances, number of speech-gesture VS, the type of gesture (deictic, representational and conventional) and the referent of the gesture c) pragmatic function (Information querying, Ideational, regulatory). We seek to address the following questions: 1) To what extent are VS combined with gestures? 2) Is there a type of gesture that prevails in VS? 3) Is the referent of the gestures  related to the repeated item of the VS? 3) Does the pragmatic function expressed in VS explain the use of gestures? In order to examine whether the utterances included in VS were accompanied by gestures more frequently than other CDS utterances, we calculated the proportion of bimodal (gesture and speech) utterances included in VS over the total amount of bimodal utterances. Lastly, regarding the pragmatic function, we considered the amount of gestures included in VS fullfilling each pragmatic function over the total amount of VS for each pragmatic function.  Analysis on the type and referent of gestures is in progress. Beta regressions were used to test the effect of the pragmatic function over the proportion of VS that included gestures.We found that 30% of the multimodal utterances in the 15-minute interaction were part of VS both in the Argentinean and Spanish data. We also found that mothers employed significatively more gestures in VS that fulfill an action regulative function. As suggested by Schaffer et al. (1983), who also found a greater number of gestures coordinated with utterances with an action directive function, gestures may serve to disambiguate the location or object for the desired action. By doing so, caregivers are sending different but related messages to the child through speech and gesture. The current analyses on the types and referents of the gestures directed to the children during the use of VS will contribute to our understanding of the multimodal nature of early interactions. Furthermore, we hope we can discuss the synergic effects of the repeated forms that are typical of VS and child directed gestures.