The comparison rests upon the studies in Özyürek and Kita (1999), Kita and Özyürek (2003), Özyürek et al. (2005), and Kita et al. (2007), which used the same cartoon stimuli to elicit narrations in English, Turkey, and Japanese, with comparable quantitative data.
The studies obtained the following results:
English speakers typically used a manner verb and a path particle or preposition (e.g., he rolled down the hill) to express the two pieces of information within one clause. In contrast,
Japanese and Turkish speakers separated manner and path expressions over two clauses with path in the main clause and manner in the subordinated clause (e.g., he descended as he rolled)…. In depicting how an animated figure rolled down a hill after having
swallowed a bowling ball, Japanese and Turkish speakers were more likely to use separate gestures, one for manner and one for path, and English speakers were indeed more likely to use just one gesture to express both. (Özyürek et al., 2005, pp. 222-223)
Aside from these recurrent linguistic-imagistic patterns, the data in (Özyürek et al., 2005) also showed that English speakers could gesture like Turkish speakers when the former chose to talk about only path or only manner. Kita et al. (2007) further confirmed the influence of clause types on gesture types in English elicited narrations: “when the concurrent speech syntactically linked Manner and Path expressions tightly within a single clause, gesture tended to express Manner and Path simultaneously. When the concurrent speech syntactically linked Manner and Path expressions in a less tight way in two separate clauses, gestures tended to separate Manner and Path information” (ibid, p.
1231). Since it is rare in Turkish to package both MANNER and PATH in one clause, and it is also unusual to express them in separate VPs in a multiple-VP clause to denote a single motion event in Chinese conversations (5 out of a total 375), it remains unknown whether Turkish speakers would express these two components simultaneously in one gesture if they chose to mention both within the same clause, or whether Chinese speakers would
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produce separate gestures when they chose multiple-VP constructions. Substantial work needs to be done across different languages to determine the influence of speakers’ online choice of various linguistic patterns on gestural representation.
According to the predominant linguistic-imagistic packaging patterns across different languages, English has been shown to differ from Turkish and Japanese. As to Chinese, it exhibits a third way in the coordination of motion information between speech and gesture. On the one hand, Chinese, just like English, frequently brings MANNER and PATH
up in speech. They are ‘high-manner-salient’ languages in Slobin’s term. However, there is a language-specific serial-verb encoding of these two components within the same clause in Chinese, and unlike English speakers, Chinese speakers seldom produce conflated gestures. Nor do they gesture like Turkish and Japanese speakers, who are likely to produce two separate gestures. The preference in Chinese is to talk about PATH
and/or depict it manually.5 Thus, language specificity is evidenced in the alignments of motion information in linguistic encodings and manual depictions among a satellite-framed language, two verb-satellite-framed languages, and a verb-serializing language.
Such linguistic-imagistic variation can further reveal language specificity in the conceptualization of motion. Because of the intimate connection between language and gesture, which has been supported by a considerable amount of evidence in different lines of research, conceptualization of an event includes both linguistic and imagery content.
Speech and gesture together in the real-time expression of motion provide more insights into what people think about motion. The findings in Chinese discourse with regard to the recurrent patterns in expressing motion in speech and gesture provide converging evidence in support of Chinese speakers’ habitual focus of attention on a certain aspect of
5 The studies in Turkish and Japanese showed that speakers would produce separate gestures for MANNER and PATH. However, it is not clear whether speakers would prefer gesturing a particular component when they just produce one gesture for the same motion event.
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motion. Although it is beyond the scope of the study to discuss embodied cognition (Wilson, 2002; Shapiro, 2007; Barsalou, 2008; Glenberg, 2010), the recurrent focus of attention on PATH during online speaking in Chinese could reveal the salience of PATH in the conceptualization of motion embodied in people’s perceptual and bodily experiences in daily social interaction.
It is hoped that conversational data from other languages will be available to confirm language specificity in representing motion information in speech and gesture. Second, while the discourse factor of information state does not appear to affect the linguistic-imagistic representation of motion, the nature of the other factors that may influence the occurrence of gestures needs further research.
19 References
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Armstrong, David F. & Sherman E. Wilcox (2007). The Gestural Origin of Language.
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