Processus de focalisation multimodale lors des dîners familiaux français: une comparaison entre familles parlantes et familles signantes

Abstract Speech planning allows the speaker to highlight new information in order to draw the interlocutor’s attention. This focalization process has been described in spoken and sign languages, but rarely in a natural context such as family interaction. In this article, we study focalization at its prosodic level, by comparing the phenomena and parameters mobilized in the two types of language, within a privileged context, in order to observe focus marking during parent-children interaction: the family dinner. We make an inventory of prosodic focalization markers, mobilized in both languages and both modalities (spoken and gestural), from a sample of videorecorded meals in LSF and spoken French (ANR DinLang). We observe that prosodic features of focalization can be established in inter-modal terms and that focus is marked by the combination of various phenomena, which appear in contrast with the prosodic context. We give the example of a pattern that seems interesting to us to examine in the context of focalization, the one of scansion, and we emphasize the interest of considering sign languages and ‘spoken’ languages as embodied languages.