Structure of French expression of motion: Gesture-speech relation, between-language comparison and developmental perspective
Résumé
This chapter contributes to the present discussion about the expression of motion in French by presenting a psycholinguistic study that focuses on how information about motion is structured not only in speech but also in co-speech gesture. Interested in developmental and cross-linguistic perspectives, we included adults as well as 5- and 10-year-old children and compared French with a typologically different and less commonly studied language – Czech. Using data from narrations of short video clips featuring various motion events, we found that, in French, gestural expression of motion is organized more similarly to verbal expression of motion than in Czech. We also observed an age-related increasing tendency to include more information about motion into fewer clauses and gestural strokes.