Funktion och betydelse hos nickningar och huvudskakningar hos tre svenska barn mellan 18 och 30 månader

Sammanfattning: Gestures are used by people in all cultures to express themselves. This is done through both conventional gestures, sometimes called emblems, and non-conventional gestures whose meaning is more dependent on the situation in which they are made. The purpose of this study is to examine how Swedish children between the ages 18 and 30 months use nodding and head shakes, both of which are conventionalized gestures in multimodal utterances, together with speech. The study encompasses how nods and head-shakes are used and what function and meaning they have in utterances. It is argued that children use conventionalized gestures in ways that are sometimes more typical and sometimes less typical, and in the latter case there is also room for creativity. To some extent the study also covers the development of the usage of these gestures over time, although data is limited in this regard. Even though head shakes are more common than nodding, and become even more so over time, the use of both gestures decrease as the children get older. The results also show that there is great variation in the ways in which gestures may be used and that gesture frequencies can vary greatly from child to child.