Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Özçalışkan, Şeyda
• Lucero, Ché
• Goldin‐Meadow, Susan

Titel

Blind Speakers Show Language‐Specific Patterns in Co‐Speech Gesture but Not Silent Gesture

Ist Teil von

• Cognitive science, 2018-04, Vol.42 (3), p.1001-1014

Ort / Verlag

United States: Wiley-Blackwell

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Wiley Online Library - AutoHoldings Journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Sighted speakers of different languages vary systematically in how they package and order components of a motion event in speech. These differences influence how semantic elements are organized in gesture, but only when those gestures are produced with speech (co‐speech gesture), not without speech (silent gesture). We ask whether the cross‐linguistic similarity in silent gesture is driven by the visuospatial structure of the event. We compared 40 congenitally blind adult native speakers of English or Turkish (20/language) to 80 sighted adult speakers (40/language; half with, half without blindfolds) as they described three‐dimensional motion scenes. We found an effect of language on co‐speech gesture, not on silent gesture—blind speakers of both languages organized their silent gestures as sighted speakers do. Humans may have a natural semantic organization that they impose on events when conveying them in gesture without language—an organization that relies on neither visuospatial cues nor language structure.