Development of cross-linguistic variation in speech and gesture: Motion events in English and Turkish.

Abstract

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.

Developmental perspectives on the expression of motion in speech and gesture

“…The finding that both French and English speaking children predominantly produce Path gestures are consistent with previous suggestions that children prefer 'separated' gestures, that is gestures that express either Path or Manner rather than conflating both (McNeill 2005;Özyürek et al 2008). The additional observation that English children show adjustments towards more conflation in later childhood is also consistent with previous studies.…”

“…Interestingly, in the domain of motion, two studies find evidence of gradual development towards adult-like gesturing in Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, English, and Turkish (McNeill 2005;Özyürek et al 2008). All children in these studies tend to produce more Manner and Path separately than adults who instead conflate Manner and Path in one gesture.…”

A Comparative Study on Representational Gestures in Italian and Japanese Children

“…Future research may examine whether similar findings could be reported for other cultures and for other age groups. Recent studies (Gullberg 2009;Ö zyürek et al 2008) have already shown that the use of gesture to describe motion events is associated with the structure of the spoken language. Improvement of such investigations might greatly contribute to our understanding of how and when culture and language influence the development of gesture and speech.…”

The parallel development of the form and meaning of two-handed gestures and linguistic information packaging within a clause in narrative

“…The data used in this study were collected as part of a study investigating the cross-linguistic syntactic packaging of 'path' and 'manner' information in motion events (Allen, Özyürek, Kita, Brown, Furman, Ishizuka, & Fujii, 2007;Kita, et al, 2007;Özyürek, et al, 2001;Özyürek, Kita, Allen, Brown, Furman, & Ishizuka, 2008). The current study is a reanalysis of this existing data with a different research purpose-to investigate the way in which two-handed gesture varies with age.…”