%0 Journal Article
%T Talking to the beat: Six
%A Ivan Yuen
%A Katherine Demuth
%A Mili Mathew
%J First Language
%@ 1740-2344
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/0142723717734949
%X Children are known to use different types of referential gestures (e.g., deictic, iconic) from a very young age. In contrast, their use of non-referential gestures is not well established. This study investigated the use of stroke-defined non-referential ¡®beat¡¯ gestures in a story-retelling and an exposition task by twelve 6-year-olds, an age at which proficiency in discourse is beginning to develop. The goals of the study were to (1) establish if children this age use stroke-defined beats, (2) determine whether the two discourse types influence the incidence of stroke-defined beats, and (3) examine the extent to which stroke-defined beats co-occur with lexical words or pitch accents. The results showed that nine of the children produced at least one beat gesture with a well-defined stroke phase, and that the frequency of the stroke-defined beat gesture use did not differ significantly between the two tasks. Stroke-defined beats occurred more often on lexical words than function words, but they did not co-occur more often with a pitch accent, suggesting its potential link with pitch accents for emphasis. This study therefore provides support for children¡¯s ¡®prosodic¡¯ use of gesture ¨C a function which may become more common as discourse abilities develop
%K Discourse
%K emphasis
%K gestural development
%K gesture¨Cspeech relationship
%K stroke-defined beats
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0142723717734949