Quand un père emprunte les gestes de sa fille : fonctions discursive et intersubjective de la reprise gestuelle

As for their first vocalisations, children's first gestures can be taken up by their parents to create early forms of dialogue. In this paper, we investigated the nature, frequency and role of a father's uptakes of his daughter's gestures, analysed between the ages of 1;0 and 1;06, the period during which the child starts using her first words. We observed that the father takes up deictic and conventional gestures and as well as self-centered gestures. The former tend to be taken up to express and maintain an element of discursive alignment with the child, as the father adds verbal language onto the child's productions and therefore provides her with rich multimodal feedback. The latter seem to fulfil a playful interactive function as they are produced for the pleasure of imitation and to maintain the interaction. Some of these self-centered gestures are then transformed by the father and given a conventionalised meaning, shared by the linguistic community. These two types of gestural uptakes are therefore ideal loci to grasp the significant role of parents in children's language acquisition and language socialisation.