Development of Cross-Linguistic Variation in Speech and Gesture: Motion Events in English and Turkish

The way adults express manner and path components of a motion event varies across typologically different languages both in speech and cospeech gestures, showing that language specificity in event encoding influences gesture. The authors tracked when and how this multimodal cross-linguistic variatio...

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Published inDevelopmental psychology Vol. 44; no. 4; pp. 1040 - 1054
Main Authors Ozyurek, Asli, Kita, Sotaro, Allen, Shanley, Brown, Amanda, Furman, Reyhan, Ishizuka, Tomoko
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States American Psychological Association 01.07.2008
Subjects
Adolescent
Adult
Boston
Child
Child, Preschool
Concept Formation
Contrastive Linguistics
Cross-Cultural Comparison
English (Second Language)
Female
Gestures
Humans
Language Classification
Language Development
Language Variation
Male
Motion
Nonverbal Communication
Psycholinguistics
Second Language Learning
Semantics
Speech Communication
Turkey
Turkish
Verbal Behavior
Young Children
Turkey
Boston
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Summary:The way adults express manner and path components of a motion event varies across typologically different languages both in speech and cospeech gestures, showing that language specificity in event encoding influences gesture. The authors tracked when and how this multimodal cross-linguistic variation develops in children learning Turkish and English, 2 typologically distinct languages. They found that children learn to speak in language-specific ways from age 3 onward (i.e., English speakers used 1 clause and Turkish speakers used 2 clauses to express manner and path). In contrast, English- and Turkish-speaking children's gestures looked similar at ages 3 and 5 (i.e., separate gestures for manner and path), differing from each other only at age 9 and in adulthood (i.e., English speakers used 1 gesture, but Turkish speakers used separate gestures for manner and path). The authors argue that this pattern of the development of cospeech gestures reflects a gradual shift to language-specific representations during speaking and shows that looking at speech alone may not be sufficient to understand the full process of language acquisition. (Contains 5 figures, 2 tables, and 2 footnotes.)
ISSN:0012-1649
DOI:10.1037/0012-1649.44.4.1040