“To catch”, Experience Representation in the Narratives of Children with Intellectual Disabilities

Abstract

There is limited research that deepens into the characteristics of communicative resources

and meanings exchanged in the communication of children with intellectual disabilities. The

present study is positioned in a social semiotic paradigm to explore the semantic functions

of nonverbal resources in the representation of experience in the narratives of children with

intellectual disabilities. From a multimodal approach to communication we recognize the

semiotic value of all resources for the construction of meanings. Based on an audiovisual

corpus of narratives of four children with intellectual disabilities, we develop a multimodal

discourse analysis of a recounting task with visual support of a picture book, focused on ideational

metafunction. The results show that narrators construct the narrative knot “catch”

through semiotic ensembles that include different types of deictic gestures on the images

of the picture book and pantomime. These semiotic ensembles allow the intersemiotic construction

of both actions and the participants Agent and Goal, as well as reactions: Reactor

and Phenomenon. The discourse analysis of this research as well as the preliminary data open

the doors to new questions about the communication of this singular group of narrators