Gestures, conceptualisation and lexicalization
المؤلف:
Paul Warren
المصدر:
Introducing Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P92
2025-11-04
24
Gestures, conceptualisation and lexicalization
Languages clearly differ from one another in many respects, and researchers have made use of these differences in their exploration of the relationship between gestures and language production. Languages differ from one another in their vocabulary. If gestures are at least in part linked to what can be expressed through words, do vocabulary differences relate also to differences in how gestures are used That is, as the speaker moves from pre-linguistic conceptualisation to language formulation, the lexicalisation processes may vary between languages, and so too may the gestures (Kita, 2009).
Linguistic differences
In a comparative study of English and Japanese native speakers, Kita (2000) looked at the gestures associated with a description of a sequence in a cartoon story where a cat is swinging on a rope across a street from one building to another, where he has seen a bird in a window. A linguistic difference between English and Japanese is that while English has an intransitive verb that depicts the down-then-up trajectory of the cat across the street (the cat swings across the street), Japanese does not. Therefore, when Japanese participants talked about this part of the cartoon, they did not use expressions that encoded the arc of the swinging action. Instead, they used phrases which might be translated as jump across to’ or go in the direction of the bird’, etc.
Interestingly, the analysis of their gestures showed that the Japanese participants were likely to use straight-line gestures to show the movement of the cat from one building to the other, while the English-speaking participants almost exclusively used arc-like gestures. While some of the Japanese speakers did use a separate arc-like gesture in addition to the straight-line gesture, only the latter coincided with the words indicating the movement.
Recall that the model of language production sketched in Chapter 2 distinguished pre-linguistic conceptualisation and linguistic encoding as different components of the production process. It has been argued that gestures can reflect both the conceptual mental model of what is being depicted and the linguistic encoding of that model. In the case of English, these coincide, since the verb s has the arc-like movement encoded in it. In Japanese, however, the linguistic expressions have a straight-line movement, hence the straight-line gesture, while the pre-linguistic mental model of the message has the arc-like movement, and hence the additional arc-like gestures made by some of the participants in this study. So gestures can relate either to the pre-linguistic conceptualisation of what is being talked about, or to the linguistic formulation of this model which may be more restrictive, as in the Japanese example here, or to both as for the English speakers.
In addition to lexical differences, syntactic differences between languages can be reflected in gestural practices. Again, the focus has been on expressions showing movement. In particular, researchers have looked at how languages convey the manner or type of the movement and the direction or pathway of the movement. As shown in 6.9, the tendency in English is for the manner to be contained in the meaning of the verb roll, while the direction or pathway is expressed using an adverbial construction within the same clause, such as a prepositional phrase (down the slope). In other languages, such as Japanese and Turkish, the path is typically expressed in the verb and the manner by an additional clause. So to express the same idea in those languages speakers would use a sentence that would look like 6.10 in English (Kita &–zyurek, 2003).
These two pieces of information – the manner of movement and the pathway – are clearly part of the speaker’s intention during the conceptualisation stage of planning an utterance, in either type of language. However, the grammatical encoding processes differ depending on how the language expresses these two components, with different sequencing in the sentence structures for the two languages. This encoding difference is also reflected in the gestures used in different languages – English speakers use a single hand-gesture combining a circling movement for the roll with a sideways movement of the hand for the direction. (Kita &– zyurek 2003), however, showed that Japanese and Turkish speakers are more likely to show the path and the manner in two separate gestures, coordinated with the two clauses of the speech.
Cultural differences
The comparative studies of gesturing in languages such as English and Japanese are examples of a number of studies that have looked at the relationship between gesture, language and cognition. A further set of findings points to cultural differences in how spatial relationships are referred to. These have been attributed to cognitive differences in the conceptualisation of such relationships.
On the one hand, there are largely western cultures where spatial orientation relative to the perceiver is important. This is reflected in both linguistic and non-linguistic tasks. So if a speaker from one of these cultures is describing a series of objects, then they will say that one object is to the left or right of another, and so on. If that speaker is shown a group of objects and is then asked to turn around and draw that group of objects then the drawing will keep the relative orientation so the object that is on the left will still be on the left in the picture.
On the other hand, there are cultures where what is important is the absolute spatial orientation. An example of absolute orientation is com pass directions. So for example one object is to the west or north, etc. of another object. This is encoded in some languages, so that a description of three objects in a line will say that one is to the west of another and the third is to the east of the middle one. Interestingly, when speakers of such languages are asked to turn around 180 degrees and draw the objects, they will preserve the absolute orientation, so the first object is still to the west of the second one. From the western left-to-right way of thinking the drawing will appear to be the reverse of the reality (Levinson, 2003 ; Levinson, Kita, Haun & Rasch, 2002).
What happens when speakers from these different language communities use gestures to accompany their speech Not surprisingly, westerners will use left-to-right gestures for a left-to-right description, in relative space and regardless of which way they are looking. Speakers of languages that use absolute spatial relationships will change the direction of their gestures, depending on which direction they are facing. They keep the absolute direction. The cultural difference between relative and absolute spatial orientation is reflected both in the patterns of language and in the nature of the accompanying gestures.
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