Katharina Rohlfing:
Pointing to spatial relations in mother-child
dialogue
Abstract
We examined the characteristics of maternal input in a task-oriented dialoque,
in which a mother instructed her child to put two objects together. In our
setting, we varied the spatial relation (ON and UNDER) and the canonicality
of these relations (canonical such as ‘a pot on a table’ and noncanonical
like ‘a train on a tunnel’). In our paper, we report about various functions
of the pointing gesture used by mothers in order to adjust to their child’s
capacity of understanding. We suggest that the functions are not only in
accordance with the deictic but also with an iconic meaning, which challenges
the taxonomy proposed for gesture types in the literature.
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