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.