Adult’s spoken reformulations of children’s plurisemiotic productions:highlighting the primacy of spoken language
Résumé
As children under two years old are not yet fluent users of spoken language, other more iconic, more embodied and situated semiotic means are likely to be meaningful to adults when interacting with them. Adults often reformulate multimodal cues (such as gaze, facial expressions, gestures but also mundane actions or unintentional movements) into spoken forms and thus shape them into patterns that are compatible with the adult language system. As children progressively master the phonology, lexicon, morphology, syntax and pragmatics of their native tongue, priority is given to verbal resources as adults provide spoken repairs (Forrester, 2008), recasts (Chouinard and Clark 2003), or recyclings of prior productions (Goodwin 2018).
Drawing on an ethnographic study of longitudinal French and English-speaking adult-child interactions filmed at home, we will analyze how adults highlight (Goodwin, 2018) their transmission of the spoken code in their interpretations and reformulations of their children’s actions and gestures. By providing glosses of their children’s multimodal cues, and highlighting the value of speech, adults transform those cues into speech turns and integrate them in the verbal interaction. Through detailed analyses of excerpts of our longitudinal data, this study aims to illustrate how hearing adults foreground speech as the primary vehicle to language their experience. In the process, children learn to inhibit their capacity for rich syncretic embodied communication but develop a fruitful expertise to adapt to adults and creatively appropriate the intricacies of the forms of expression specific to their surrounding cultural community.