Non-referential beat gestures and their function of self-repair in children’s narratives

Abstract

Since children have not yet finished acquiring their linguistic skills, failures in speech are common in their utterances. Thus, repairs are necessary to convey the intended message, but they can also be multimodal. If referential gestures emerge quite early during children’s multimodal development, non-referential beats appear later, and they are usually known for their parsing, prosodic and focus-marking function, but they could also have hidden functions. Twenty-two French-speaking children between seven and ten years old were videorecorded while narrating a cartoon to their parents. Verbal and Multimodal Self-repairs were coded. Repairs were analyzed according to their type (lexical, phonological, and syntactic). Gestures were coded based on their nature (non-referential beats, referential and pragmatic gestures). Results show that beats were the most frequent type of gestures used by children during self-repairs, especially for lexical retrieval and syntactic utterance (re)construction. This highlights a new function of beats that we know very little of.