Multimodal expression in communicative functions, gestures, vocalizations, and the contribution of early musicality

Abstract

The communicative functions with which infants and pregrammatical speaking children use signs to interact with others have been the subject of different classifications, usually concentrated in one modality (gesture, word) or in bimodal combinations of gesture and word, or oriented by a particular criterion (for example, some were conceived thinking of types of signs, others of the illocutionary acts of utterances, etc.). With an integrative aim, we propose a classification of the communicative functions of oral, gestural, and combined modalities, also suitable to include signs of other types and especially designed to deal with pregrammatical expressive resources. The system of categories is forged in attention both to the structural scheme of the communicative act, bearing in mind its actors, roles, and component elements, and to the motives or intentions that lead pregrammatical infants and children to interact with others through behaviors performed, purposively, for the other to decode. This double consideration, together with the longitudinal recording of a single case during the period of first word combinations, allowed both to include categories usually omitted in classifications for competent speakers (adults, older children) and to exclude others that still require the acquisition of prior enabling cognitive skills. Three new categories are also posited, two of them liminal to the communication phenomenon, linked to musicality and multimodality, which allow conceiving the development of the child’s semiosis as a continuity between precommunicative and later communicative dyadic behavioral skills.