Michèle Guidetti

Recognition of emotional and nonemotional facial expressions: A comparison between Williams syndrome and autism

The aim of our study was to compare two neurodevelopmental disorders (Williams syndrome and autism) in terms of the ability to recognize emotional and nonemotional facial expressions. The comparison of these two disorders is particularly relevant to the investigation of face processing and should contribute to a better understanding of social behaviour and social cognition. Twelve participants with WS (from 6;1 to 15 years) and twelve participants with autism (from 4;9 to 8 years) were matched on verbal mental age. Their performances were compared with those of twelve typically developing controls matched on verbal mental age (from 3;1 to 9;2). A set of five tasks assessing different dimensions of emotional and nonemotional facial recognition were administered. Results indicated that recognition of emotional facial expressions is more impaired in Williams syndrome than in autism. Our study comparing Williams syndrome and autism over a small age range highlighted two distinct profiles which call into question the relationships between social behaviour/cognition and emotion perception.

Age-related changes in co-speech gesture and narrative: Evidence from French children and adults

As childrens language abilities develop, so may their use of co-speech gesture. We tested this hypothesis by studying oral narratives produced by French children and adults. One hundred and twenty-two participants, divided into three age groups (6years old, 10years old and adults), were asked to watch a Tom and Jerry cartoon and then tell the story to the experimenter. All narratives were videotaped, and subsequently transcribed and annotated for language and gesture using the ELAN software. The results showed a strong effect of age on language complexity, discourse construction and gesture. The age effect was only partly related to the length of the narratives, as adults produced shorter narratives than 10-year-olds. The study thus confirms that co-speech gestures develop with age in the context of narrative activity and plays a crucial role in discourse cohesion and the framing of verbal utterances. This developmental shift towards more complex narratives through both words and gestures is discussed in terms of its theoretical implications in the study of gesture and discourse development.

Yes or no? How young French children combine gestures and speech to agree and refuse

The aim of the study presented here was to examine variations in the forms and functions of agreement and refusal messages--which can be solely gestural, solely verbal, or combined gestural and verbal--by thirty children aged 1;4, 2;0, and 3;0 (ten in each age group) observed at home during an interaction with their mother. The results showed that even though verbal forms were the predominant ones as a whole, gestural forms were carried over into the linguistic period, and for the youngest children, constituted the sole means of agreeing and refusing. They also showed that the most frequently expressed function was assertion.

Introduction to special issue: Gestures and communicative development.

What does hand movement have to do with language and communicative development? This Introduction proposes that language acquisition researchers have at least four reasons to be interested in gesture and communicative development. First, children begin to gesture before talking. Second, children continue to gesture even after they start to talk, and through to adulthood. Third, recent theoretical perspectives on language acquisition have advanced a functional approach to communicative development in which usage is crucial in language acquisition. Fourth, the argument that spoken language evolved from gestures raises intriguing questions about the relationship between phylogenesis and ontogenesis. We outline different developmental trajectories for different kinds of gestures, developmental changes in the relationship between speech and gestures, and the developmental analysis of gesture functions. The six new empirical studies reported in this Special Issue are summarized.

The emergence of pragmatics: forms and functions of conventional gestures in young French children*:

The purpose of this study was twofold: to examine the forms of conventional gestures used by young French children aged 16 to 36 months when interacting with their mothers in everyday situations, and to look at the functions of those gestures based on an adapted version of the classification system proposed in speech act theory. The results showed that the most frequent types of gestures were pointing, and gestures of agreement or refusal. Pointing increased with age, particularly between 16 and 24 months. Most of the pointing gestures were assertives, produced in combination with words or vocalizations. The mean number of assertive agreements rose with age, especially purely gestural ones.

Effects of age and language on co-speech gesture production: an investigation of French, American, and Italian children's narratives.

The aim of this paper is to compare speech and co-speech gestures observed during a narrative retelling task in five- and ten-year-old children from three different linguistic groups, French, American, and Italian, in order to better understand the role of age and language in the development of multimodal monologue discourse abilities. We asked 98 five- and ten-year-old children to narrate a short, wordless cartoon. Results showed a common developmental trend as well as linguistic and gesture differences between the three language groups. In all three languages, older children were found to give more detailed narratives, to insert more comments, and to gesture more and use different gestures--specifically gestures that contribute to the narrative structure--than their younger counterparts. Taken together, these findings allow a tentative model of multimodal narrative development in which major changes in later language acquisition occur despite language and culture differences.

Children's perception and understanding of (dis)similarities among dynamic bodily/facial expressions of happiness, pleasure, anger, and irritation.

The current study examined the abilities of children (6 and 8 years of age) and adults to freely categorize and label dynamic bodily/facial expressions designed to portray happiness, pleasure, anger, irritation, and neutrality and controlled for their level of valence, arousal, intensity, and authenticity. Multidimensional scaling and cluster analyses showed that children (n=52) and adults (n=33) structured expressions in systematic and broadly similar ways. Between 6 and 8 years of age, there was a quantitative, but not a qualitative, improvement in labeling. When exposed to rich and dynamic emotional cues, children as young as 6 years can successfully perceive differences between close expressions (e.g., happiness, pleasure), and can categorize them with clear boundaries between them, with the exception of irritation, which had fuzzier borders. Childrens classifications were not reliant on lexical semantic abilities and were consistent with a model of emotion categories based on their degree of valence and arousal.

Gesture and language in narratives and explanations: the effects of age and communicative activity on late multimodal discourse development.

This article addresses the effect of communicative activity on the use of language and gesture by school-age children. The present study examined oral narratives and explanations produced by children aged six and ten years on the basis of several linguistic and gestural measures. Results showed that age affects both gestural and linguistic behaviour, supporting previous findings that multimodal discourse continues to develop during the school-age years. The task (narration vs. explanation) also had clear effects on the use of language and gesture: gestures and subordinate markers were more frequent in explanations than in narratives, whereas cohesion markers were more often used in narratives. Altogether, these results show partly distinctive developmental patterns between narrative monologic discourse behaviour and explanatory behaviour in the context of dialogue and question-answer exchanges.

Perception of Everyday Sounds: A Developmental Study of a Free Sorting Task

Objectives The analysis of categorization of everyday sounds is a crucial aspect of the perception of our surrounding world. However, it constitutes a poorly explored domain in developmental studies. The aim of our study was to understand the nature and the logic of the construction of auditory cognitive categories for natural sounds during development. We have developed an original approach based on a free sorting task (FST). Indeed, categorization is fundamental for structuring the world and cognitive skills related to, without having any need of the use of language. Our project explored the ability of children to structure their acoustic world, and to investigate how such structuration matures during normal development. We hypothesized that age affects the listening strategy and the category decision, as well as the number and the content of individual categories. Design Eighty-two French children (6–9 years), 20 teenagers (12–13 years), and 24 young adults participated in the study. Perception and categorization of everyday sounds was assessed based on a FST composed of 18 different sounds belonging to three a priori categories: non-linguistic human vocalizations, environmental sounds, and musical instruments. Results Children listened to the sounds more times than older participants, built significantly more classes than adults, and used a different strategy of classification. We can thus conclude that there is an age effect on how the participants accomplished the task. Analysis of the auditory categorization performed by 6-year-old children showed that this age constitutes a pivotal stage, in agreement with the progressive change from a non-logical reasoning based mainly on perceptive representations to the logical reasoning used by older children. In conclusion, our results suggest that the processing of auditory object categorization develops through different stages, while the intrinsic basis of the classification of sounds is already present in childhood.

Facial Emotion Labeling in Language Impaired Children.

The few studies that have investigated emotion labeling in children with specific language impairment (SLI) have generally focused on global identification performances and appear contradictory. The current study is a fine-grained examination of how children with SLI and typical peers differ in the accuracy of their emotional lexicon use. Children underwent a free labeling task of five basic emotions expressed by still face photographs. Results revealed that children with SLI were less accurate in their label use than typical children. However, pattern of confusions between the two groups differed only by a confusion between sadness and anger displayed by the SLI group. It is argued that this emotion labeling deficiency may rely on semantic fields overlap.