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Do gestures follow speech in bilinguals’ description of motion?*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2015

ŞEYDA ÖZÇALIŞKAN
ŞEYDA ÖZÇALIŞKAN*
Affiliation:
Georgia State University
*
Address for correspondence: Dr. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Georgia State University, Department of Psychology, PO Box 5010, Atlanta, GA 30302—5010, United States. seyda@gsu.edu
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Abstract

When do the gestures do and do not follow the patterns of the language one speaks? We examined this question by studying 10 Turkish-English bilingual adults (Turkish as L1) in comparison to 10 monolingual English and 10 monolingual Turkish adults as they described motion events either in speech with gesture (co-speech gesture) or only in gesture without speech (silent gesture). All speakers – monolingual and bilingual – showed cross-linguistic differences in co-speech gesture but not in silent gesture. Moreover, bilinguals followed L1 co-speech gesture patterns even when speaking L2, suggesting that acquisition of native-like gesture patterns does not co-occur with the acquisition of native-like speech patterns in bilinguals.

Keywords

bilingual gesturesecond languageco-speech gesturesilent gesturecrosslinguistic gesturemotion eventsEnglishTurkish
Type
Research Notes
Information
Bilingualism: Language and Cognition , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , May 2016 , pp. 644 - 653
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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Footnotes

*

Thanks to Anthony Casagrande, Vanessa Larick, and Christianne Ramdeen for their help in stimuli development, data collection and coding and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments; supported by a GSU Language and Literacy Grant to the author.

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