International Workshop

Lieu : Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3,
Institut du Monde Anglophone,
5 rue de l’école de médecine, Paris 6e
(Petit et Grand Amphi)

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14h15-15h15 Marion Blondel (Université Paris 8/CNRS), Dominique Boutet (Université Paris 8/CNRS), Fanny Limousin (Georgetown University), Pauline Beaupoil & Aliyah Morgenstern (Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3)
Hearing and Deaf children’s gestures and signs in negative constructions
The study of the expression of negation in longitudinal data of adult-child conversations is a privileged locus to combine multimodal analyses of gesture with prosody, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. First negative constructions seem to take over from early gestures of rejection and avoidance, but tracing the transitions between actions and gestures, and between gestures and signed or vocal expressions in very young children is quite complex. In 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 monomodal 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 analyzed 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. We focus on palms-up and index-wave gestures and underline systematic properties at the junction between coverbal gestures and signs. To do so, we show
a) their contrastive physiological patterns,
b) the common properties of each pattern through the four corpora,
c) their semantic and pragmatic value for the expression of negation.

15h15-16h15 Gary Morgan (City University London) Comparing co-speech gestures and sign languages in children and adults How do children learn the rules of a signed language from different types of input? What is the function of gesture in sign language development? There are a lot of similarities between gestures and signs but also important differences. By studying the overlap between these two visual-manual systems we can explore language acquisition and language evolution. We compared child signers with deaf and hearing parents and document how early gestures and signs become organised into a language system.

16h30-17h30 Discussion lead by Michèle Guidetti (Université Toulouse 2-Le Mirail), Marion Blondel (Université Paris 8/CNRS), Jean-Marc Colletta (Université Stendhal - Grenoble 3) and Aliyah Morgenstern (Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3) with our guests and the audience