Pantomime (Not Silent Gesture) in Multimodal Communication: Evidence From Children’s Narratives

• Main Authors: Paula Marentette, Reyhan Furman, Marcus E. Suvanto, Elena Nicoladis
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2020-11-01
• Series: Frontiers in Psychology
• Subjects: pantomime; co-speech gesture; non-co-speech gesture; multimodal communication; narrative, children; silent gesture
• Online Access: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.575952/full

Pantomime has long been considered distinct from co-speech gesture. It has therefore been argued that pantomime cannot be part of gesture-speech integration. We examine pantomime as distinct from silent gesture, focusing on non-co-speech gestures that occur in the midst of children’s spoken narratives. We propose that gestures with features of pantomime are an infrequent but meaningful component of a multimodal communicative strategy. We examined spontaneous non-co-speech representational gesture production in the narratives of 30 monolingual English-speaking children between the ages of 8- and 11-years. We compared the use of co-speech and non-co-speech gestures in both autobiographical and fictional narratives and examined viewpoint and the use of non-manual articulators, as well as the length of responses and narrative quality. The use of non-co-speech gestures was associated with longer narratives of equal or higher quality than those using only co-speech gestures. Non-co-speech gestures were most likely to adopt character-viewpoint and use non-manual articulators. The present study supports a deeper understanding of the term pantomime and its multimodal use by children in the integration of speech and gesture.