Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This work focuses on an issue situated at the intersection of two domains: the oral mode of communication vs. the written mode of communication, and language acquisition. The backbone of this research is a conjecture that, for some age groups (babies, toddlers and preschool-aged children), to explore the acquisition of discourse as a whole (including gestures, facial expressions, prosody, pauses and discursive markers, etc.) is more appropriate than explore the acquisition of language exclusively. “The Pear Film” experimental line underpins the method of this research. The database comprises 74 ‘pear stories’ of Moscow preschool-aged children and high school students. Three parameters of the discourse are of interest for the authors: a logical structure and a coherence of the narrative; gestures and spontaneous movements lost any communicative meaning; discourse words and pauses.