A cross-linguistic study of the development of gesture and speech in Zulu and French oral narratives

The present study reports on a developmental and cross-linguistic study of oral narratives produced by speakers of Zulu (a Bantu language) and French (a Romance language). Specifically, we focus on oral narrative performance as a bimodal (i.e., linguistic and gestural) behaviour during the late lang...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of child language 2017-01, Vol.44 (1), p.36-62
Main Authors: KUNENE NICOLAS, RAMONA, GUIDETTI, MICHÈLE, COLLETTA, JEAN-MARC
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Adults
African Languages
Age Differences
Bantu languages
Behavior
Child
Child, Preschool
Children
Cognitive science
Comparative linguistics
Education
Elementary School Students
Female
France
French
French language
Gestures
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
Language
Language Acquisition
Language Development
Linguistics
Male
Narration
Narratives
Native language acquisition
Native Speakers
Nonverbal Communication
Oral history
Oral Language
Pragmatics
Psychology
Romance languages
Semantics
Semiotics
South Africa
Speech
Spoken language
Story Telling
Studies
Verbal Communication
Young Adult
Zulu language
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Summary:The present study reports on a developmental and cross-linguistic study of oral narratives produced by speakers of Zulu (a Bantu language) and French (a Romance language). Specifically, we focus on oral narrative performance as a bimodal (i.e., linguistic and gestural) behaviour during the late language acquisition phase. We analyzed seventy-two oral narratives produced by L1 Zulu and French adults and primary school children aged between five and ten years old. The data were all collected using a narrative retelling task. The results revealed a strong effect of age on discourse performance, confirming that narrative abilities improve with age, irrespective of language. However, the results also showed cross-linguistic differences. Zulu oral narratives were longer, more detailed, and accompanied by more co-speech gestures than the French narratives. The parallel effect of age and language on gestural behaviour is discussed and highlights the importance of studying oral narratives from a multimodal perspective within a cross-linguistic framework.
ISSN:0305-0009
1469-7602
DOI:10.1017/S0305000915000628