Özet:

This article applies Boutet’s kinesiological approach (2018) to a study of the expression of negation in four children evolving in contrastive language environments: predominantly monolingual (English, French, LSF) or bilingual (LSF-French), predominantly unimodal (visual modality- gestural) or bimodal (visuo-gestural and audio-vocal). We approach the expression of negation in its developmental and multimodal aspects according to an integrated model that views gestures as part of language. Our hypothesis was that some of the formal features of the gestural expression of negation are invariant and common to signing and non-signing children. In this study, we describe the emergence and development of multimodal expressions of negation, depending on whether the target language integrates sign language or not, and explore the gestural invariants of the expression of negation. We focus on two shared gestures present in the four children to determine their kinesiological invariants. We show how the four children studied in this paper produce shared gestures combined with the target languages in bimodal expressions of negation. In addition, the two signing children use forms of gestural negation which gradually become grammaticalized and integrated into sign language with age. We propose a common origin to what are usually called “co-verbal gestures” of negation, and the sign language-core lexicon of negation. Shared gestures and sign-specific gestures could be part of a continuum in which semantic and formal features are tightly connected, confirming that the body informs meaning.

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