Aliyah Morgenstern | Université Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle (original) (raw)
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Papers by Aliyah Morgenstern
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2017
Sources of Variation in First Language Acquisition
Recurrent Gestures
This paper presents a multimodal and form-based approach to language development grounded in situ... more This paper presents a multimodal and form-based approach to language development grounded in situated practices and focuses on the longitudinal analysis of a composite gesture, the shrug, in two datasets of mother-child interactions in French and British English. The shrug in its full-fledged form can combine a palm-up, lifted shoulders, a head tilt, raised eyebrows and a mouth shrug (Kendon, 2004; Streeck, 2009). All formal components and functions of the two children’s shrugs between the ages of 1 and 4;2 were coded within the multimodal ongoing discourse. Multiple correspondence analyses were combined with detailed qualitative analyses. Despite differences in the two children, interesting similarities in the development were observed over three periods: (1) absence is mainly expressed with palm-ups; (2) both children start using head tilts and shoulder lifts to express epistemicity and interpersonal positioning; (3) head tilts increase, and each body part is more clearly associat...
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2017
C'est l'heure du dîner de Léonard. Il regarde la caméra.
C'est l'heure du dîner de Léonard. Il regarde la caméra.
L'enfant a 2 ans 6 mois 15 jours.
L'enfant a 2 ans 6 mois 15 jours
Appetite, 2022
Studies often suggest that the family meal is the locus for the acquisition of healthy eating hab... more Studies often suggest that the family meal is the locus for the acquisition of healthy eating habits. However, these studies rarely offer a deeper understanding of what it is about eating together as a family that increases the intake of healthy foods, such as fruits and vegetables. This ethnographic study examines dinners in French households, whose children have shown to habitually consume fruits and vegetables, analyzing talk around the dinner table. Our analysis shows that naturally occurring exchanges between parents and children socialize children to experiencing eating in culturally informed ways that promote attending to the prized characteristics, such as origin, quality, taste, and preparation of food items that intrinsically elevates their value and leads to their consumption. These communicative patterns also encourage reflection and openness to foods, which, we posit, constitute ways of 'doing being French'. Ultimately, we argue that French children's readiness to eat fruits and vegetables is not linked to them being healthy, but rather is derived from the cultural significance of experiencing sensory pleasure from food and from being able to talk about and share these experiences with others, that is being reflective eaters.
Gesture in Language, 2021
Selon Elizabeth Bates, la grammaire des langues naturelles est tellement impregnee de reference a... more Selon Elizabeth Bates, la grammaire des langues naturelles est tellement impregnee de reference a la personne que leur acquisition requiere une conscience de soi. Ceci implique que l’on pourrait utiliser nos observations sur l’acquisition des marques de personne pour comprendre l’emergence de la conscience de soi chez l’enfant (Bates 1990 : 165). Or, nous pouvons constater que les enfants francophones entre un an et demi et trois ans, n’emploient pas uniquement les formes adultes je et moi je en position sujet dans les enonces utilises pour referer a eux-memes. On trouve egalement des voyelles preverbales, et des predications sans sujets explicites, leur prenom, le pronom de deuxieme personne, de troisieme personne et le pronom objet (moi). Cet usage de formes non standard fait partie d’un cheminement particulier qui permet a l’enfant de s’approprier le systeme de references personnelles de la langue adulte. L’enfant fait alors preuve de creativite et associe a chaque forme, une fon...
The analysis of speech and gesture provides insight into the mental representation of how an even... more The analysis of speech and gesture provides insight into the mental representation of how an event occurred in time and how people communicate about it in a multimodal fashion. Duncan (2002) showed that the duration of gesture strokes tends to be longer and more agitated with event descriptions in the imperfective than with those using perfective verb forms. These gesture features were found in English, which marks progressive and non-progressive verb forms, and in Mandarin Chinese, which uses durative and perfective particles to characterize described events as ongoing or as complete. These findings were further confirmed for English by McNeill (2003) and Parrill et al. (2013). Even research including English as a second language (Becker et al. 2011) has shown that both the production and comprehension of verbs expressing different event types can be related to co-speech gesture features that reflect specific semantic aspectual categories going back to Vendler (1957, 1967). However...
In this study, we address the expression of negation in four longitudinal studies including 1) Ma... more In this study, we address the expression of negation in four longitudinal studies including 1) Madeleine, a hearing child in multimodal French interactions, 2) Ellie, a hearing child in multimodal English interactions; 3) Charlotte, a deaf child of deaf parents in mono-modal LSF interactions, 4) Illana, a child with one deaf, one hearing parent in bimodal bilingual (French-LSF) interactions. All the negative utterances including French, English or LSF, symbolic gestures and actions, were coded and analysed between 12 and 36 months for the four children. We draw the four pathways to illustrate how each child combines symbolic categories and visual/aural modalities in successive steps with respect to her own linguistic environment: Madeleine and Ellie use gestures less as they enter verbal negation but keep using the gestural cues when necessary or for emphasis. Charlotte uses more and more manual and non-manual combinations including co-verbal gestures and LSF items. Illana uses fewe...
Weist (1986) suggests that the development of the concept of time in the course of child language... more Weist (1986) suggests that the development of the concept of time in the course of child language acquisition goes through several main stages, organized according to the principles of Reichenbach’s model (1947). In the final stage of this model, children develop the concept of reference time. They thus become capable of manipulating reference time separately from speech time and event time and to produce speech, from the point of view of someone who would be in the past, or the future. In parallel, they develop the ability to tell stories or talk about imaginary people, objects or events. This final stage in the ability to use the concept of time raises a fundamental issue: how do children learn to speak about what does not exist in the real world and only exists through language? This is fundamentally different from what they do in their first years. During that time, they speak either about things that they perceive in the here and now or about things that they do not perceive in...
A multimodal approach to the expression of past events in oral interactions can shed light on how... more A multimodal approach to the expression of past events in oral interactions can shed light on how we can incorporate gestural representations of the subjects’ construal of event structure and correlate them with the verb forms used. Are the differences in the grammatical options that different languages provide for characterizing events also clear in the quality of the co-verbal gestures we use? In order to tackle this issue, we analyzed the grammatical aspects, tense and time as well as gestures used by pairs of students as they related past events in the framework of the Polimod project directed by Alan Cienki. In this paper, we will focus on French and on the verbal forms in the imparfait, and passe compose with their associated gestures. We transcribed the data in ELAN and annotated it using the coding scheme for aspect, time and tense and the boundary schemas developed in the project (Muller, 2000) differentiating what we called “bounded” and “unbounded” gestures. We then devel...
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2017
Sources of Variation in First Language Acquisition
Recurrent Gestures
This paper presents a multimodal and form-based approach to language development grounded in situ... more This paper presents a multimodal and form-based approach to language development grounded in situated practices and focuses on the longitudinal analysis of a composite gesture, the shrug, in two datasets of mother-child interactions in French and British English. The shrug in its full-fledged form can combine a palm-up, lifted shoulders, a head tilt, raised eyebrows and a mouth shrug (Kendon, 2004; Streeck, 2009). All formal components and functions of the two children’s shrugs between the ages of 1 and 4;2 were coded within the multimodal ongoing discourse. Multiple correspondence analyses were combined with detailed qualitative analyses. Despite differences in the two children, interesting similarities in the development were observed over three periods: (1) absence is mainly expressed with palm-ups; (2) both children start using head tilts and shoulder lifts to express epistemicity and interpersonal positioning; (3) head tilts increase, and each body part is more clearly associat...
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2017
C'est l'heure du dîner de Léonard. Il regarde la caméra.
C'est l'heure du dîner de Léonard. Il regarde la caméra.
L'enfant a 2 ans 6 mois 15 jours.
L'enfant a 2 ans 6 mois 15 jours
Appetite, 2022
Studies often suggest that the family meal is the locus for the acquisition of healthy eating hab... more Studies often suggest that the family meal is the locus for the acquisition of healthy eating habits. However, these studies rarely offer a deeper understanding of what it is about eating together as a family that increases the intake of healthy foods, such as fruits and vegetables. This ethnographic study examines dinners in French households, whose children have shown to habitually consume fruits and vegetables, analyzing talk around the dinner table. Our analysis shows that naturally occurring exchanges between parents and children socialize children to experiencing eating in culturally informed ways that promote attending to the prized characteristics, such as origin, quality, taste, and preparation of food items that intrinsically elevates their value and leads to their consumption. These communicative patterns also encourage reflection and openness to foods, which, we posit, constitute ways of 'doing being French'. Ultimately, we argue that French children's readiness to eat fruits and vegetables is not linked to them being healthy, but rather is derived from the cultural significance of experiencing sensory pleasure from food and from being able to talk about and share these experiences with others, that is being reflective eaters.
Gesture in Language, 2021
Selon Elizabeth Bates, la grammaire des langues naturelles est tellement impregnee de reference a... more Selon Elizabeth Bates, la grammaire des langues naturelles est tellement impregnee de reference a la personne que leur acquisition requiere une conscience de soi. Ceci implique que l’on pourrait utiliser nos observations sur l’acquisition des marques de personne pour comprendre l’emergence de la conscience de soi chez l’enfant (Bates 1990 : 165). Or, nous pouvons constater que les enfants francophones entre un an et demi et trois ans, n’emploient pas uniquement les formes adultes je et moi je en position sujet dans les enonces utilises pour referer a eux-memes. On trouve egalement des voyelles preverbales, et des predications sans sujets explicites, leur prenom, le pronom de deuxieme personne, de troisieme personne et le pronom objet (moi). Cet usage de formes non standard fait partie d’un cheminement particulier qui permet a l’enfant de s’approprier le systeme de references personnelles de la langue adulte. L’enfant fait alors preuve de creativite et associe a chaque forme, une fon...
The analysis of speech and gesture provides insight into the mental representation of how an even... more The analysis of speech and gesture provides insight into the mental representation of how an event occurred in time and how people communicate about it in a multimodal fashion. Duncan (2002) showed that the duration of gesture strokes tends to be longer and more agitated with event descriptions in the imperfective than with those using perfective verb forms. These gesture features were found in English, which marks progressive and non-progressive verb forms, and in Mandarin Chinese, which uses durative and perfective particles to characterize described events as ongoing or as complete. These findings were further confirmed for English by McNeill (2003) and Parrill et al. (2013). Even research including English as a second language (Becker et al. 2011) has shown that both the production and comprehension of verbs expressing different event types can be related to co-speech gesture features that reflect specific semantic aspectual categories going back to Vendler (1957, 1967). However...
In this study, we address the expression of negation in four longitudinal studies including 1) Ma... more In this study, we address the expression of negation in four longitudinal studies including 1) Madeleine, a hearing child in multimodal French interactions, 2) Ellie, a hearing child in multimodal English interactions; 3) Charlotte, a deaf child of deaf parents in mono-modal LSF interactions, 4) Illana, a child with one deaf, one hearing parent in bimodal bilingual (French-LSF) interactions. All the negative utterances including French, English or LSF, symbolic gestures and actions, were coded and analysed between 12 and 36 months for the four children. We draw the four pathways to illustrate how each child combines symbolic categories and visual/aural modalities in successive steps with respect to her own linguistic environment: Madeleine and Ellie use gestures less as they enter verbal negation but keep using the gestural cues when necessary or for emphasis. Charlotte uses more and more manual and non-manual combinations including co-verbal gestures and LSF items. Illana uses fewe...
Weist (1986) suggests that the development of the concept of time in the course of child language... more Weist (1986) suggests that the development of the concept of time in the course of child language acquisition goes through several main stages, organized according to the principles of Reichenbach’s model (1947). In the final stage of this model, children develop the concept of reference time. They thus become capable of manipulating reference time separately from speech time and event time and to produce speech, from the point of view of someone who would be in the past, or the future. In parallel, they develop the ability to tell stories or talk about imaginary people, objects or events. This final stage in the ability to use the concept of time raises a fundamental issue: how do children learn to speak about what does not exist in the real world and only exists through language? This is fundamentally different from what they do in their first years. During that time, they speak either about things that they perceive in the here and now or about things that they do not perceive in...
A multimodal approach to the expression of past events in oral interactions can shed light on how... more A multimodal approach to the expression of past events in oral interactions can shed light on how we can incorporate gestural representations of the subjects’ construal of event structure and correlate them with the verb forms used. Are the differences in the grammatical options that different languages provide for characterizing events also clear in the quality of the co-verbal gestures we use? In order to tackle this issue, we analyzed the grammatical aspects, tense and time as well as gestures used by pairs of students as they related past events in the framework of the Polimod project directed by Alan Cienki. In this paper, we will focus on French and on the verbal forms in the imparfait, and passe compose with their associated gestures. We transcribed the data in ELAN and annotated it using the coding scheme for aspect, time and tense and the boundary schemas developed in the project (Muller, 2000) differentiating what we called “bounded” and “unbounded” gestures. We then devel...