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Children Use Non-referential Gestures in Narrative Speech to Mark Discourse Elements Which Update Common Ground
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Description: This study analyzes the longitudinal development of the pragmatic value that referential and non-referential gestures have in information structure marking in children’s narrative discourse. Main findings: a) at both time points, both referential and non-referential gestures were produced more with information that moves discourse forward (i.e., focus) and predication (i.e., comment) rather than topical or background information; b) at 7–9 years of age, children tended to use more non-referential gestures to mark focus and comment constituents than referential gestures; c) in terms of the marking of the newness of discourse referents, non-referential gestures already seem to play a key role at 5–6 years old, whereas referential gestures did not show any patterns and this relationship was even stronger at 7–9 years old. For more information, please read our paper published in Frontiers in Psychology: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661339 In this study, we used data from the "Audiovisual corpus of Catalan children's narrative discourse development". Please see more information about this corpus and the links to subprojects that used this corpus here: https://osf.io/npz3w/