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Article Dans Une Revue Journal of Child Language Année : 2017

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

Résumé

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.
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Dates et versions

hal-02074663 , version 1 (20-03-2019)

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Ramona Kunene Nicolas, Michèle Guidetti, Jean-Marc Colletta. A cross-linguistic study of the development of gesture and speech in Zulu and French oral narratives. Journal of Child Language, 2017, 44 (01), pp.36-62. ⟨10.1017/S0305000915000628⟩. ⟨hal-02074663⟩
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