Shreejata Gupta
Aix-Marseille Université
Unlike pointing gestures, Offering and Showing are proximal gestures in which the child holds out an object in the direction of a partner. Their link with communication is particularly interesting because, although very similar, ‘Offering’ has been considered to fulfill an imperative function and ‘Showing’ a declarative function (Guevara & Rodriguez, 2023; Salter & Carpenter, 2022; Carpendale & Wallbridge 2023). The early development of these gestures is the focus of this project, which aims to quantify the underlying communicative intentions as a function of reactions elicited in social partners.
We manually annotated ‘Offering ‘and ‘Showing’ gestures from 25 hours of video recordings (French-Paris & French-Lyon corpora on the CHILDES platform) of spontaneous interactions between six 12- to 15-months-old infants and their caregivers (Gupta et al., in review). Frequencies of gestures produced and nature respective reactions elicited in social partners were calculated.
Preliminary results confirm that Offering and Showing have different objectives and they indeed receive distinct responses from partners, driving the direction of social interactions. Further analysis will be carried out to examine whether the morphology of the gesture, the child’s gaze or vocalisation already differ according to the child’s intention at the end of the first year.
DFG SPP "The Active Self" 