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42 | 2010
Multimodalité de la communication chez l’enfant

Multimodality in Children’s Communication
Edited by Jean-Marc Colletta, Agnès Millet and Catherine Pellenq
Lidil, n° 42 (2010)
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196 p. - 16 €
ISBN 978-2-84310-184-7

The theme of this issue is language acquisition through multimodal aspects (linguistic AND non-linguistic outputs in the service of communication). Over the past two decades, the research in acquisition that takes into account the plurality of semiotic resources has profoundly altered what was previously thought to be well-established knowledge. As far as the acquisition of spoken language is concerned, the idea that the two-year-old would free themselves from “body language” to achieve linguistic communication control has proven to be completely erroneous; not only does gestuality remain in communication throughout ageing and evolve throughout language development, it also plays a key role in the emergence of precocious and delayed linguistic acquisitions. Language acquisition amongst deaf children is a complex issue, but here too, findings from multimodal descriptions modify and enrich available knowledge, allowing us to glimpse, from one deaf child to another, a multitude of environments, profiles, and acquisitional pathways. Above all, they allow us to re-examine the tools used for analysis: what is the basic unit of communication? How do you define a linguistic unit that pertains to several modalities? Where does linguistics start and end? Finally, what is language? The eight articles presented offer distinct, often novel, sometimes highly original points of view on the multimodality of language in deaf and hearing children with typical or atypical development and across different languages and cultures.

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