Global-Synthetic Nature of Gestures in Verbal Route Descriptions
Résumé
Interested in how people learn and understand dynamic space as well as in how spatial thinking and talking about space involve multimodal representations, we analyzed co-speech gestures produced by children – aged 6-7, 8-9 and 10-11 – during a route description task. The present paper shows the very first results (including descriptive statistics and qualitative analysis) from one part of our complex study. In this particular part, we focused on global and synthetic characteristics of gestural representation in contrast to linear and segmented verbal representation. We observed that a single gesture could depict more than one element of route (e.g. motion+landmark) and that the frequency of these cases tends to increase with age. We also found that one and the same gesture could display iconic and deictic characteristics jointly, which leads us to discuss gesture typology and classification.