Previous research has shown language-specific features play a guiding role in how children develop expression of events with speech and gestures. This study adopts a multimodal approach and examines Mandarin Chinese, a language that features context use and verb serializations. Forty children (four-to-seven years old) and ten adults were asked to describe fourteen video stimuli depicting different types of causal events involving location/state changes. Participants’ speech was segmented into clauses and co-occurring gestures were analyzed in relation to causation. The results show that the older the children, the greater the use of contextual clauses which contribute meaning to event descriptions. It is not until the age of six that children used adult-like structures – namely, using single gestures representing causing actions and aligning them with verb serializations in single clauses. We discuss the implications of these findings for the guiding role of language specificity in multimodal language development.

先前的研究表明，语言特定的特征在儿童如何通过言语和手势表达事件方面发挥着指导作用。本研究采用多模态方法并研究普通话，这是一种以上下文使用和动词序列化为特征的语言。四十名儿童（四到七岁）和十名成人被要求描述十四个视频刺激，描述涉及位置/状态变化的不同类型的因果事件。参与者的演讲被分成子句，并分析同时出现的手势与因果关系的关系。结果表明，孩子年龄越大，越多地使用有助于事件描述的上下文条款。直到六岁，孩子们才开始使用类似成人的结构，即使用单个手势来表示引起的动作，并将它们与单个从句中的动词序列对齐。我们讨论这些发现对语言特异性在多模式语言发展中的指导作用的影响。