ONTOGENY OF TWO COMMUNICATIVE TOOLS: DISTANCE ENCODING & MULTIMODALITY IN DEICTIC POINTING

The aim of this paper is to experimentally study the development of speech/gesture relationship within language. The participants, both adults and children, had to designate a target placed at two different distances. They had to perform a deictic gesture accompanied by a deictic word, or to use either of the two modalities independently. Using one vs two pointing modalities allowed us to specify the interaction between the two systems as a useful cooperation, in terms of communicative efficiency. Furthermore, articulatory cues in the vocal modality and kinematic cues in the gestural modality encode the target's distance, and that in a different way in adults as compared with children. The huge variability found in children indicates that they are learning to control the communicative tools they have.