Elena T. Levy

Cohesion and gesture

Discourse cohesion is viewed from the perspective of a speech/gesture synthesis. Based on narrative and conversational data, we present cross‐cultural evidence of cohesive elements marked by repetitive gestures that maintain continuity with respect to their location in space, the hand with which they are produced, and/or their form. The data show the joint contribution made by speech and gesture to the process of creating and maintaining discourse topics. It is claimed that an approach to discourse that focuses on events taking place at the moment of speaking, unlike approaches that assume the prior existence of planned discourse units, can account for the impact of speech and gesture on thought; for example, the execution of a gesture helps the speaker to track presupposed background information, and so provides a basis for the production of the communicatively dynamic part of an utterance. The proposed model of discourse production is a dialectic, in which gesture and speech provide interacting voices, ...

Speech, gesture, and discourse

In this article we argue that on‐line linguistic choices are made in a matrix of continuous discourse connections. We investigate the hypothesis that communicative dynamism (CD) is this representation of the whole in the parts. We view CD as a graded variable that can be measured only with respect to large stretches of discourse. Based on our analysis of extended narrative and conversational data, we find that CD directly correlates with the quantity of linguistic material devoted to a reference. We identify two strategies with which this is accomplished: one “constructive,” the other “anticipatory.” We find that gestures of the kind co‐occurring with speech also reflect the communicative status of the utterance. Initial positions of explicitly delineated narrative units are accompanied by more gestures (both pointing and “beats”). A similar phenomenon appears in a highly unstructured conversation, with pointing gestures accompanying initial references to topics. We interpret these correlations of the qua...

Words in discourse: a dialectical approach to the acquisition of meaning and use.

Word learning by young children is viewed as a problem of deriving meaning from the use of forms in discourse contexts. Uses of causal and temporal terms in private speech by a child studied longitudinally from 1;9 to 3;0 are analysed from this perspective. Evidence is presented that words are first constrained to uses in specific discourse contexts, and later used more flexibly and with greater control over the semantics of the terms. Derivation of meaning from discourse is described as a dialectical process, and as such it is claimed to be more consistent with the full range of observational data, and with theories of word learning applicable to older children and adults, than other current theories of lexical acquisition in early childhood.

Chapter 7 Speech and Gesture

When people talk they can be seen making spontaneous movements called ‘gestures’. These are usually movements of the arms and hands and they are closely synchronized with the flow of speech. Gestures and speech occur in very close temporal alignment and often have identical meanings, or ‘idea units’ (Kendon, 1980). Yet they express these idea units in fundamentally different ways. While speech is segmented (into phonemes, words, phrases, etc.), gestures are global and synthetic. There is no gesture ‘language’. Comparing speech to gesture thus enables us to observe the same idea unit expressed in two different ways at the same time. A comparison of this kind produces an effect on our understanding of the linguistic system and gesture something like the effect of triangulation in vision. Many new details, previously hidden, spring out in the new dimension of seeing. Rather than analytically slicing the person into modules, taking into account gesture encourages seeing something like the entire personality as a single theoretical entity - thinking, speaking, acting as a unit.

The Roots of Coherence in Discourse

This article is concerned with the emergence of logical coherence across children’s repetitions of their own narrative discourse. I propose that coherence does not emerge in isolation of language, but that it depends on the use and manipulation, in ongoing speech, of specific linguistic forms, such as the clause-linking devices that form part of the cohesive system, the text-forming component of language. Using observations from a young child’s spontaneous speech and from older children’s elicited narrations, I propose that a function of repeated language play is to set up subsequent discourse for the use of increasingly compact sequences of clauses. This creates narrative compression, an integration of clauses that is not only structural but semantic as well, and that corresponds to a description of events that is more coherent than what was originally described. I point out parallels to the grammaticalization of discourse across both diachronic and longer-term ontogenetic time, and I place the findings within a developmental and social framework.

A Social-Pragmatic Account of the Development of Planned Discourse

This article presents a social-pragmatic account of the emergence of planned discourse in development. The central claim is that planned discourse is a product of interactive emergence, arising in development from the creation of discourse themes, and that these in turn are dependent on language, especially on the linguistic subsystem of cohesion. I propose that the emergence of discourse themes relies on children’s use and elaboration, in spontaneous speech, of cohesive terms that are at first borrowed from adult sources. The extrasentential processes proposed to account for the development of discourse themes are parallel to those that have been proposed at an intrasentential level. The persistent influence of adult discourse patterns is illustrated with examples from a young child’s spontaneous crib talk, especially from culturally packaged sources such as nursery rhymes, story books, and fairy tales.

How Autistic Children May Use Narrative Discourse to Scaffold Coherent Interpretations of Events: A Case Study

High-functioning autistic children often behave as if they fail to integrate information or seek out coherence. In this article we present a social-pragmatic account of this impairment, in which we propose that social and linguistic deficits tend to isolate autistic children from the experiences that promote the integration of information by other children. This hypothesis is based on the view that, in typical human development, language plays a central role in creating coherence, including the ability to infer the intentions of others. The proposal is supported by a case study of an autistic adolescent who, when provided with adult scaffolding as he repeatedly retells a story, shows the same kinds of changes shown by unimpaired, although younger, children. An implication is that the difficulty that autistic children have in pulling information together arises, in part, from problems with the narrative mode of discourse. We infer that, provided with the right kinds of language-use experiences, high-functioning autistic children may develop the ability to find coherence in the events they experience.