Geste et participation des enfants aux interactions polyadiques

Abstract Gesture plays an important role in human communication and in the organisation of language interactions. Some theoretical models in psychology and linguistics also give it a central place. Gesture and the multimodality of children’s language productions have long been under particular attention. They have often been studied in the context of dyadic parent-child interactions. However, most children encounter numerous situations of multiparty interactions from birth, and children’s participation in these interactions contributes to the process of language acquisition. The aim of this article is to highlight the relationship between gesture and children’s participation in multiparty interactions. On the basis of qualitative and quantitative analyses of corpora collected in spontaneous multiparty interactions in the framework of different research projects, we highlight the way in which gesture enables children to participate in interactions as speakers, addressees and observers, and we question the way in which the occupation of these different statuses can, in turn, contribute to the development of a gestural language competence. The selection and organisation of the data presented were driven by the perspective of applied projects in early childhood education and care settings (where gesture is not systematically taken into account when measuring children’s participation) or with hearing families with a deaf child (where the potential of multiparty interactions for language development tends to be underestimated).