Introducing infants to referential events: a development study of maternalostensive marking in French

It is well known that mothers give their infants lessons in conversational competence from an early age. This study considered how maternal gestures a nd prosody contribute to this developing competence. It examines how mother s use ostensive marking to point out common references at different stages of development. The corpus consisted of longitudinal observations of four m other-infant dyads during free play (infants aged 0;4 to I;I), at three sta ges of sensorimotor development (III, IV and V). Four dimensions of ostensi ve marking were considered: (I) the span of the marked utterance (holistic vs. local); (2) the communication channel used (gestural vs. prosodic); (3) the type of gestural marker (oriented, iconic, conventional, beats); and ( 4) the type of prosodic marker (emphasis, prosodic cliche, reinforced nucle ar stress, focal accent). Although there was no clear change in the pattern s of specific types of gestural or prosodic markers, the results showed tha t mothers adapt their gestures to the infant's processing level. Between st ages III and V, they move from holistic to local and from gestural to proso dic marking. Stage IV appears to be an excellent period for observing the t ransition.