Skip to main content

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
Cancel
×
×
Home
  • Home
Article
  • Cited by 6
  • Cited by
    Crossref Citations
    Crossref logo
    This article has been cited by the following publications. This list is generated based on data provided by CrossRef.
    ATEŞ, BEYZA Ş. and KÜNTAY, AYLİN C. 2018. Referential interactions of Turkish-learning children with their caregivers about non-absent objects: integration of non-verbal devices and prior discourse. Journal of Child Language, Vol. 45, Issue. 01, p. 148.
    Smith, Kendra C. Multhaup, Kristi S. and Ihejirika, Rivka C. 2017. From Eyewitness to Academic Contexts: Examining the Effect of Misinformation in First and Second Languages. Applied Cognitive Psychology, Vol. 31, Issue. 5, p. 546.
    Debreslioska, Sandra and Gullberg, Marianne 2017. Discourse Reference Is Bimodal: How Information Status in Speech Interacts with Presence and Viewpoint of Gestures. Discourse Processes, p. 1.
    So, Wing-Chee Wong, Miranda Kit-Yi Lui, Ming and Yip, Virginia 2015. The development of co-speech gesture and its semantic integration with speech in 6- to 12-year-old children with autism spectrum disorders. Autism, Vol. 19, Issue. 8, p. 956.
    Ng, Melvin Mai-Rong Demir, Özlem Ece and So, Wing Chee 2015. The Acquisition of Reference. Vol. 15, Issue. , p. 105.
    Allen, Shanley E.M. Hughes, Mary and Skarabela, Barbora 2015. The Acquisition of Reference. Vol. 15, Issue. , p. 123.
    ×
  • Get access
    Add to cart USD25.00
    Check if you have access via personal or institutional login
    Log in Register Recommend to librarian

Sensitivity to information status in discourse: Gesture precedes speech in unbalanced bilinguals

  • WING-CHEE SO (a1), JIA-YI LIM (a2) and SEOK-HUI TAN (a2)
Abstract

This paper explores whether English–Mandarin bilingual children have mastered discourse skills and whether they show sensitivity to the discourse principle of information status of referents in their speech and gestures. We compare the speech and gestures produced by bilingual children to those produced by English- and Mandarin-speaking monolingual children. Six English-speaking and six Mandarin-speaking monolingual children, and nine English–Mandarin bilingual children (who were more dominant in English) were videotaped while interacting with their caregivers. Monolingual Mandarin- and English-speaking children produced null arguments and pronouns respectively to indicate given third-person referents, and nouns to indicate new third-person referents. They also gestured new third-person referents more often than given third-person referents. Thus, monolinguals’ speech and gestures followed the discourse principle. English–Mandarin bilingual children's speech and gestures also followed the discourse principle but only when they were speaking in English. They produced nouns more often to indicate given third-person referents than to indicate new third-person referents in Mandarin, indicating the violation of the discourse principle. It is interesting that they gestured new third-person referents more often than given third-person referents in Mandarin. Thus, our findings suggest that gesture precedes language development at discourse level in the less-dominant language in bilinguals.

Copyright
COPYRIGHT: © Cambridge University Press 2012 
Corresponding author
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Wing Chee So, Department of Educational Psychology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. E-mail: wingchee@cuhk.edu.hk
References
Hide All
Alibali, M. (1999). How children change their minds: Strategy change can be gradual or abrupt. Developmental Psychology, 35, 127–145.
Allen, S. E. M. (2000). A discourse-pragmatic explanation for argument representation in child Inuktitut. Linguistics, 38, 483–521.
Allen, S., & Schroder, H. (2003). Preferred argument structure in early Inuktitut spontaneous speech data. In Du Bois, J. W., Kumpf, L., & Ashby, W. (Eds.), Preferred argument structure: Grammar and architecture for function. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bialystok, E. (1988). Beyond binary options: Effects of two languages on the bilingual mind. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 33, 47–60.
Bloom, P. (1990). Subjectless sentences in child's language. Linguistic Inquiry, 24, 721–734.
Capirci, O., Contaldo, A., Caselli, M. C., & Volterra, V. (2005). From action to language through gesture: A longitudinal perspective. Gesture, 5, 155–177.
Chafe, W. (1987). Cognitive constraints on information flow. In Tomlin, R. S. (Ed.), Coherence and grounding in discourse (pp. 21–51). Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins.
Chiu, K. (2001). Topic chain and grounding in Chinese discourse. Taipei: Crane.
Chomksy, N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.
Church, R. B., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (1986). The mismatch between gesture and speech as an index of transitional knowledge. Cognition, 23, 43–71.
Clancy, P. (1993). Preferred argument structure in Korean acquisition. In Clark, E. (Ed.), The proceedings of the 25th Annual Child Language Research Forum (pp. 307–331). Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
Cromdal, J. (1999). Childhood bilingualism and metalinguistic skills: Analysis and control in young Swedish-English bilinguals. Applied Psycholinguistics, 20, 1–20.
Dixon, L. Q. (2005). The bilingual education policy in Singapore: Implications for second language acquisition. In Cohen, J., McAlister, K. T., Rolstad, K., & MacSwan, J. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism (pp. 625–635). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla.
Du Bois, J. W. (1987). The discourse basis of ergativity. Language 63, 805–855.
Garber, P., Alibali, M. W., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (1998). Knowledge conveyed in gesture is not tied to the hands. Child Development, 69, 75–84.
Goldin-Meadow, S., Alibali, M. W., & Church, R. B. (1993). Transitions in concept acquisition: Using the hand to read the mind. Psychological Review, 100, 279–297.
Goldin-Meadow, S., & Singer, M. A. (2003). From children's hands to adults’ ears: Gesture's role in teaching and learning. Developmental Psychology, 39, 509–520.
Gullberg, M. (2006). Handling discourse: Gestures, reference tracking, and communication strategies in early L2. Language Learning, 56, 155–196.
Hakuta, K., & Diaz, R. (1985). The relationship between degree of bilingualism and cognitive ability: A critical discussion and some new longitudinal data. In Nelson, K. E. (Ed.), Children's language (Vol. 5, pp. 319–344). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Huang, C. T. J. (1984). On the distribution and reference of empty pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry, 15, 531–574.
Hyams, N., & Wexler, K. (1993). On the grammatical basis of null subjects in child language. Linguistic Inquiry, 24, 421–459.
Iverson, J. M., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2005). Gesture paves the way for language development. Psychological Science, 16, 367–371.
Lee, J., & Naigles, L. R. (2005). Input to verb learning in Mandarin Chinese: A role for syntactic bootstrapping. Developmental Psychology, 41, 529–540.
Li, C. N., & Thompson, S. (1979). Third-person pronouns and zero-anaphora in Chinese discourse. In Givon, T. (Ed.), Discourse and syntax: Vol. 12. Syntax and semantics (pp. 311–335). New York: Academic Press.
Li, W. (2004). Topic chains in Chinese discourse. Discourse Processes, 37, 25–45.
Mayberry, R., & Nicoladis, E. (2000). Gesture reflects language development: Evidence from bilingual children. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9, 192–196.
Missing the bilingual boat. (2009, November 27). Straits Times.
MM Lee wants learning of Chinese to be fun. (2009, November 18). Straits Times.
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and mind: What gesture reveals about thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Narasimhan, B., Budwig, N., & Murty, L. (2005). Argument realization in Hindi caregiver–child discourse. Journal of Pragmatics, 37, 461–495.
Nicoladis, E., Mayberry, R. L., & Genesee, F. (1999). Gesture and early bilingual development. Developmental Psychology, 35, 514–526.
Özçalışkan, S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2005). Gesture is at the cutting edge of early language development. Cognition, 96, B101–113.
Pakir, A. 1998. English in Singapore: The codification of competing norms. In Gopinathan, S., Pakir, A., Kam, H. W., & Saravanan, V. (Eds.), Language, society and education in Singapore: Issues and trends (2nd ed., pp. 65–84). Singapore: Times Academic.
Paradis, J., & Navarro, S. (2003). Subject realization and crosslinguistic interference in the bilingual acquisition of Spanish and English: What is the role of the input? Journal of Child Language, 30, 371–393.
Pearson, B. Z., Fernández, S. C., Lewedeg, V., & Oller, D. K. (1997). The relation of input factors to lexical learning by bilingual infants. Applied Psycholinguistics, 18, 41–58.
Perry, M., Church, R. B., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (1988). Transitional knowledge in the acquisition of concepts. Cognitive Development, 3, 359–400.
Shepherd, J. (2005). Striking a balance: The management of language in Singapore. New York: Peter Lang.
Serratrice, L., & Sorace, A. (2003). Overt and null subjects in monolingual and bilingual Italian acquisition. In Beachley, B., Brown, A., & Conlin, F. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 27th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 739–750). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla.
Serratrice, L., Sorace, A., & Paoli, S. (2004). Crosslinguistic influence at the syntaxpragmatic interface: Subjects and objects in English–Italian bilingual and monolingual acquisition. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7, 183–205.
Serratrice, L. (2005). The role of discourse pragmatics in the acquisition of subjects in Italian. Applied Psycholinguistics, 26, 437–462.
So, W. C. (2010). Cross-linguistic transfer in gesture in Chinese–English bilinguals. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25, 1335–1353.
So, W. C., Kita, S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2009). Using the hands to keep track of who does what to whom: Gesture and speech go hand-in-hand. Cognitive Science, 33, 115–125.
So, W. C., Demir, E., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2010) When speech is ambiguous gesture steps in: Sensitivity to discourse-pragmatic principles in early childhood. Applied Psycholinguistics, 31, 209–224.
So, W. C., & Lim, J. Y. (2012). Point to a referent, and say, “what is this?” Gesture as a potential cue to identify referents in a discourse. Applied Psycholinguistics, 33, 329–342.
Tan, S. H. (2010). Multilingual infant vocabulary in Singapore. In Cruz-Ferreira, M. (Ed.), Multilingual norms. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
Tao, L. (1996). Topic discontinuity and zero anaphora in Chinese discourse: Cognitive strategies in discourse. In Fox, B. (Ed.), Studies in anaphora (pp. 487–513). New York: John Benjamins.
Tsao, F.-F. (1990). Sentence and clause structure in Chinese: A function perspective. Taipei: Student Book.
Wang, Q., Lillo-Martin, D., Best, C. T., & Levitt, A. (1992). Null subject versus null object: Some evidence from the acquisition of Chinese and English. Language Acquisition, 2, 221–254.
Yam, T. T. K. (1986, March). Ministry of Education parliamentary speech. Singapore.
Yew, L. K. (2000). From third world to first: The Singapore story 1965–2000: Memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew. New York: Harper.
Zheng, M., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2002). Thought before language: How deaf and hearing children express motion events across cultures. Cognition, 85, 145–175.
Recommend this journal

Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this journal to your organisation's collection.

Applied Psycholinguistics
  • ISSN: 0142-7164
  • EISSN: 1469-1817
  • URL: /core/journals/applied-psycholinguistics
Please enter your name
Please enter a valid email address
Who would you like to send this to? *

CAPTCHA *

Skip to the audio challenge
×

Metrics

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 5
Total number of PDF views: 53 *
Loading metrics...

Abstract views

Total abstract views: 263 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between September 2016 - 12th June 2018. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Cancel
Confirm
×