The Role of Adults’ Scaffolding Practices In The Blossoming of Children’s Plurisemiotic Constructions

The human ability for face-to-face communication is an extraordinary treasure, allowing us to use our voice, hands, eyes, face, whole body and mind to share and comment on meanings, thoughts, feelings, dreams, figments of our imagination or remembrances of things past. The aim of my research is to capture how children develop the complex and spontaneous orchestration of interpersonal communication out of audible, visible, or sometimes tactile behaviors thanks to their immersion in language socialization practices. The production and perception of the resulting “multimodal” signals has been assumed to interact with one’s motoric, cognitive, emotional, or sensory states or abilities (Holler & Levinson, 2019). However, these interactions are far from being unraveled and we still need to explore how the different expressive potentials of the human semiotic systems (e.g. the lexicon and grammar, prosody, gesture, gaze) interplay with and balance one another (Cienki, 2012). Through constant exposure to dialogic adult input, children’s language gradually develops into rich linguistic constructions. In this presentation, we will retrace children’s pathways into multimodal language acquisition in a scaffolding interactional environment. We will use a pluri-semiotic, multi-linguistic level approach, and a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses thanks to complementary coding with different software on ecological data collected in children’s home environment. Comparisons will be made between French, English, and LSF in deaf and hearing children. We will analyze how thanks to adult scaffolding, children’s first multimodal buds blossom into more complex constructions in which they integrate and deploy all their semiotic resources.