The Use of referential iconic character-viewpoint gestures as an indicator of child-directed narrative speech

Abstract

According to the audience design model, speakers adjust their communication strategies according to the cognitive level and needs of the audience to achieve more effective communication results. Among the various factors that affect audience design, the age of the audience is particularly important. This study investigates how co-speech gestures are used in child-directed speech (CDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS) storytelling tasks. Following a within-subjects design, 40 young adult participants (35 females and 5 males) from the TEACH-TALK corpus were asked to tell the same story to both simulated adult and child audiences. All gestures (N = 3255) were coded according to referentiality (referentials vs. non-referentials). Referential gestures were further classified according to specific dimensions of referentiality (iconicity, deixis, and metaphoricity). Specifically, referential iconic gestures were classified according to viewpoint (character-viewpoint or CVPT, observer-viewpoint or OVPT, dual-viewpoint or DVPT, and narrator-viewpoint or NVPT) and informativeness (redundant vs. non-redundant). The results showed no significant differences in the overall gesture rate, gesture referentiality, and gesture informativeness between ADS and CDS conditions. However, speakers used a higher rate of referential iconic gestures in CDS compared to ADS, and crucially, the rate of CVPT iconic gestures was significantly higher in CDS than in ADS. Our results suggest that speakers adjust their gesture use according to the needs of their audience; specifically, they are more likely to use referential iconic gestures, particularly those from a CVPT perspective, in narrative speech with children than with adults.