Crosslinguistic Investigation of Events In Speech and Gesture

"As humans we experience a flux of information arounds us, which our mind organizes into structured, meaningful representations, referred to as events, that guide our understanding of what is happening, serve as a basis for later recollection of what took place, and can be communicated to others effectively (Zacks & Tversky, 2001). Although sharing information about events that unfold around us is a crucial aspect of human communication, children, across languages, frequently omit important event components (e.g., Allen, Skarabela, & Hughes, 2008; Bunger, Trueswell, & Papafragou, 2012). Despite being well-documented, the origin of children’s linguistic omissions is not well-understood. An underexplored possibility is that children’s true expressive competence has been underestimated by looking only at what children say (their speech) but not at what children do (their gestures). In the proposed research, we directly address this gap in the literature by investigating two aspects of children’s multimodal communication about events across languages: (1) Cross-linguistic event encoding in speech and gesture, having to do with how speakers of typologically different languages express different types of events in their speech and gesture. (2) Communicative effects on event encoding in speech and gesture, having to do with how the informational needs of a communicative partner affect how speakers encode events across modalities "