Abstract:

From the perspective of the cognitive research, descriptions, explanations and definitions are discursive fragments that carry information. The description, definition and explanation of a word are processes with an organizing principle. They take place as an expansion list of informative and distinctive features and relationships. The word meaning construction then refers to a series of subordinate terms related to a superordinate word.
Our goal is to investigate how the verbal definition of a word, or the description of the object to which it refers, comprises a gesture that is responsible for a specific portion of its meaning: the distinctive features of its semantic field.
Our analytical task is to highlight the processes of meaning construction that convey a specific type of information.
The data examined are constituted by a fragment of a larger corpus previously recorded in a school setting: a reading session in which an adult-child couple discuss the meaning of a word located in the text they were reading. Following this activity, we obtained thirteen videotaped records that have been incorporated in a meta-text that presents the transcript of the turns, gestures and an interpretation of the object. Our analyzes show that gestural expression emerges first to delineate the general constant word meaning, in terms of a general category and it is then oriented to the distinctive features and their relationships. Parents construct a hierarchical propositional network that includes informative and distinctive features and relationships. Our data suggest that the gesture mainly conveys the distinctive and specific features of the semantic field of the term. Therefore, gestures play an essential and educational role in the process of meaning construction. We are using this data to improve parents’ ability to gesture during reading sessions to help their children to develop deep understanding and reading comprehension.

Keywords:

Meaning, reading comprehension, parents educational role, gestures.