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Introducing infants to referential events: a development study of maternal ostensive marking in French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 February 1999

ANNIE COLAS
ANNIE COLAS
Affiliation:
University of Provence
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Abstract

It is well known that mothers give their infants lessons in conversational competence from an early age. This study considered how maternal gestures and prosody contribute to this developing competence. It examines how mothers use ostensive marking to point out common references at different stages of development. The corpus consisted of longitudinal observations of four mother–infant dyads during free play (infants aged 0;4 to 1;1), at three stages of sensorimotor development (III, IV and V). Four dimensions of ostensive marking were considered: (1) the span of the marked utterance (holistic vs. local); (2) the communication channel used (gestural vs. prosodic); (3) the type of gestural marker (oriented, iconic, conventional, beats); and (4) the type of prosodic marker (emphasis, prosodic cliché, reinforced nuclear stress, focal accent). Although there was no clear change in the patterns of specific types of gestural or prosodic markers, the results showed that mothers adapt their gestures to the infant's processing level. Between stages III and V, they move from holistic to local and from gestural to prosodic marking. Stage IV appears to be an excellent period for observing the transition.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , February 1999 , pp. 113 - 131
Copyright
© 1999 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would especially like to thank A. G. Levitt, Professor of Linguistics and French at Wellesley College, Mass, USA, M. Vion, Professor of Psycholinguistics, Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, A. Di Cristo, Professor of Phonetics at Université de Provence, Aix-en-Provence, and G. Konopczynski, Professor of linguistics at Université de Franche-Comté, Besançon, for their insightful and fruitful comments and suggestions, and for their encouragement to publish this work.