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Research suggests that children and adults’ speech-gesture production correlates with communicative genres, cognitive developmental stages and individual differences (Alamillo, Colletta & Guidetti, 2013; Capirci et al., 2007; Sekine et al., 2015). While studies with adults propose that iconic gestures may be evolving in an ongoing interaction, with the co-participant co-constructing their meaning (Goodwin, 2003; Streeck, 2009), little is known about how children make use of gestural reference and how iconic gestures correlate with the interactive processes in activities like storytelling. In the EcoGest project, we video-recorded 46 preschool children aged four years whilst producing different communicative genres with an interlocutor (e.g. explanation, narrative, illustration). The results showed evidence for several important relations – e.g. communicative genre and iconic gestures (Rohlfing et al.), gesture viewpoint and spatial competence (Mertens et al., 2019), cognitive abilities and semantic features (Abramov et al., 2021), the influence of input modality on narrative elaboration (Carshaw et al., 2020). The current study’s aim was an in-depth analysis of the global semantic structure of the children’s oral narration and their connection with the use and (pragmatic) function of iconic gestures. This study compares explicit iconic gestures in contrast to less elaborate/diffuse constructed ones, and how this correlates with discourse competence and possible developmental changes (Mertens & Rohlfing, 2021). First results are presented and will be discussed.

In this study, two different communicative genres (explanation vs. rport) were elicited in 38German preschool children at the age of 4 years. In one part of the study, explanations of agame were elicited from the child. The game involved spatial movements and figures withvarious geometrical shapes. In a subsequent part, children reported about a puppet and its oddbehaviour to their caregiver. We examined childrens viewpoint in iconic co-speech gesturesand related it to the childrens event structures and linguistic structures that differed in termsof transitivity. Our findings suggest that children do not use viewpoints in a unified waywhich had been reported from studies with adults. In contrast, our results indicate a greatvariability in the ways children use viewpoint in iconic co-speech gesture. We found thatdifferent communicative genres (explanation vs. report) evoke different viewpoints in gesture,due to their different event structure and linguistic structure. During the genre “explanation”,O-VPT gestures occurred more frequently with intransitive utterances, whereas during thegenre “report”, C-VPT gestures occurred more frequently with transitive utterances. Moreover,neither of the events within the communicative genres exclusively evoked one specificviewpoint. Ulrich Mertens, Olga Abramov, Anne Németh, Friederike Kern, Stefan Kopp, and Katharina J. Rohlfing

In this paper, we study the limit of compactness which is a graph index originally introduced for measuring structural characteristics of hypermedia. Applying compactness to large scale small-world graphs (Mehler, 2008) observed its limit behaviour to be equal 1. The striking question concerning this finding was whether this limit behaviour resulted from the specifics of small-world graphs or was simply an artefact. In this paper, we determine the necessary and sufficient conditions for any sequence of connected graphs resulting in a limit value of CB = 1 which can be generalized with some consideration for the case of disconnected graph classes (Theorem 3). This result can be applied to many well-known classes of connected graphs. Here, we illustrate it by considering four examples. In fact, our proof-theoretical approach allows for quickly obtaining the limit value of compactness for many graph classes sparing computational costs.

Previous work by [1] studied gesture-speech interaction in adults. [1] focussed on temporal and semantic coordination of gesture and speech and found that while adult speech is mostly coordinated (or redundant) with gestures, semantic coordination increases the temporal synchrony. These observations do not necessarily hold for children (in particular with respect to iconic gestures, see [2]), where the speech and gesture systems are still under development. We studied the semantic and temporal coordination of speech and gesture in 4-year old children using a corpus of 40 children producing action descriptions in task oriented dialogues. In particular, we examined what kinds of information are transmitted verbally vs. non-verbally and how they are related. To account for this, we extended the semantic features (SFs) developed in [3] for object descriptions in order to include the semantics of actions. We coded the SFs on the children’s speech and gestures separately using video data. In our presentation, we will focus on the quantitative distribution of SFs across gesture and speech. Our results indicate that speech and gestures of 4-year olds are less integrated than those of the adults, although there is a large variability among the children. We will discuss the results with respect to the cognitive processes (e.g., visual memory, language) underlying children’s abilities at this stage of development. Our work paves the way for the cognitive architecture of speech-gesture interaction in preschoolers which to our knowledge is missing so far.

This thesis bridges between two scientific fields -- linguistics and computer science -- in terms of Linguistic Networks. From the linguistic point of view we examine whether languages can be distinguished when looking at network topology of different linguistic networks. We deal with up to 17 languages and ask how far the methods of network theory reveal the peculiarities of single languages. We present and apply network models from different levels of linguistic representation: syntactic, phonological and morphological. The network models presented here allow to integrate various linguistic features at once, which enables a more abstract, holistic view at the particular language. From the point of view of computer science we elaborate the instrumentarium of network theory applying it to a new field. We study the expressiveness of different network features and their ability to characterize language structure. We evaluate the interplay of these features and their goodness in the task of classifying languages genealogically. Among others we compare network features related to: average degree, average geodesic distance, clustering, entropy-based indices, assortativity, centrality, compactness etc. We also propose some new indices that can serve as additional characteristics of networks. The results obtained show that network models succeed in classifying related languages, and allow to study language structure in general. The mathematical analysis of the particular network indices brings new insights into the nature of these indices and their potential when applied to different networks.

People use speech and gesture together when describing an event or action, where both modalities have different expressive opportunities (Kendon, 2004). One question is how the two modalities are semantically coordinated, i.e. how meaning is distributed across speech and accompanying gestures. While this has been studied only for adult speakers so far, in this paper we present a study on how young children (4 years of age) semantically coordinate speech and gesture, and how this relates to their cognitive and (indirectly) their verbal skills. Results indicate significant positive correlations between cognitive skills of the children and gesture-speech coordination. In addition, high cognitive skills correlate with the number of semantically relevant child descriptions revealing a link between verbal and cognitive skills.