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People use spatial metaphors to talk about temporal concepts. They also gesture frequently during speech. The characteristics of these gestures give information regarding the mental timelines people form to experience time. The present study investigates the expression of temporal concepts on a natural setting with Turkish speakers. We found that T...
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Context 1
... seen in Table 1, most metaphoric gestures consisted of sagittal (40.63%), vertical (25%), and no-axis (15.63%) gestures. The use of gesture types was similar for both temporal speech types, as shown in Table 2. Beat and metaphoric gestures were the most common types with a significant level of difference among gesture types for both LP, χ 2 (3,32) = 23, p < 0.0001, and MP χ 2 (3,70) = 55.14, p < 0.0001 (see Table 2). ...
Context 2
... seen in Table 1, most metaphoric gestures consisted of sagittal (40.63%), vertical (25%), and no-axis (15.63%) gestures. The use of gesture types was similar for both temporal speech types, as shown in Table 2. Beat and metaphoric gestures were the most common types with a significant level of difference among gesture types for both LP, χ 2 (3,32) = 23, p < 0.0001, and MP χ 2 (3,70) = 55.14, p < 0.0001 (see Table 2). Although the use of gesture types did not differ between literal and metaphorical uses of temporal speech, there were differences in the use of gesture axis. ...
Similar publications
Human languages typically employ a variety of spatial metaphors for time (e.g., "I'm looking forward to the weekend"). The metaphorical grounding of time in space is also evident in gesture. The gestures that are performed when talking about time bolster the view that people sometimes think about regions of time as if they were locations in space....
Citations
... Thus, when participants learn the items in a chronological order, i.e., past items followed by future items, they are expected to remember more items compared to learning the past and future items in random order. Since we recruited native speakers of Turkish, another language that represents the time from left to right (Bostan et al., 2016), we expect to observe an increase in their memory performance when participants learn past items first and then proceed to the future items. ...
The representation of time depends heavily on spatial skills. Saj et al. (2014) demonstrated that left-hemispatial neglect patients, who lost the ability to detect objects in their left visual field, have a selective deficit in remembering items corresponding to the past, i.e., the left side of their mental timeline. The current study used the same memory task but tested neurotypical individuals (N = 76) to examine whether individual differences in spatial ability (assessed with Mental Rotation and Line Estimation tasks) as well as learning order (chronological vs. random) predict how well participants remember items and associations between the item and time (past or future). Our results indicate that higher spatial ability and chronological learning both lead to better memory both in recall and recognition tests. This study is among the first to demonstrate how individual differences may impact time representation and memory that relies on a mental timeline.
... Temporal nouns belonging to the target domain were compiled from Turkish dictionaries, thesauri and studies on space-time metaphors in Turkish with an appendix (e.g. Bostan et al., 2016). Temporal nouns in the list may refer to a point (e.g. ...
Space and time are the most central and closely related domains of human cognition. While our embodied spatial experience is considered as relatively more concrete and perceptually richer, time and accordingly, temporal understanding is abstract and elusive in nature. When speaking about time as an abstract concept, language users refer to space/ motion as a more concrete domain with well- established metaphors such as the passing of time is motion among many others. In most languages, the metaphorical grounding of time in space involves an understanding of time as a horizontal line with two perspectives: “moving- time” and “moving- ego”. The moving- time perspective assumes a mental schema in which the individual observes flowing time as in “the new year is coming up”. As per the moving- ego perspective, the individual is moving on the timeline where the future is typically in front of and the past is behind her/ him as in “we are approaching the new year”. This corpus- based study investigates the weight of moving- time and moving- ego patterns in Turkish with two verbal adjectives representing the two canonical perspectives, that is, geçen – “[time word] that passes” and geçtiğimiz – “[time word] that we pass”, respectively. 5,058 concordances associated with the two lexemes were extracted from the Turkish National Corpus. Concordances were then inspected for the instances of spacetime mapping based on a list of predefined temporal words to occupy the target domain. All occurrences were annotated according to their semantic sphere (i.e. metaphorical time, metaphorical motion, and literal motion). Chi- square and binomial tests comparing the token, type, and hapax legomena frequencies per semantic domain showed that based on the selected lexemes, the ego- moving perspective was significantly more frequent than the time- moving perspective in Turkish in contrast to many other languages. Importantly,
the metaphorical use of both lexemes in the temporal domain dominates over their nontemporal use in the spatial domain even though space and motion lie at the semantic core of geçmek – “to pass” in Turkish. The findings are expected to lay a basis for experimental studies to compare the processing ease of time- moving and ego- moving frames in Turkish, a critically understudied language in terms of space- time mapping.
... There are an increasing number of studies on the relationship between speakers' gestures and their spatialization of time (e.g. Bostan et al. 2016;Bylund et al. 2020;Li 2018;Pagán-Cánovas et al. 2020;, showing that the way people gesture about time may be vastly different across cultures and languages (e.g. Floyd 2016; Kita et al. 2001;Le Guen and Pool Balam 2012;Núñez et al. 2012;Rodríguez 2019;Sullivan and Bui 2016;Valenzuela and Alcaraz 2020). ...
This chapter examines how Chinese people (Mandarin monolinguals; Mandarin-English bilinguals; deaf Chinese Sign Language (CSL) signers; Mandarin learners of CSL) use gestures and signs to creatively represent time. All groups spatialize time on the lateral, vertical, and sagittal axes, but differ in their choices of axes and directions of movements. For instance, Mandarin-English bilinguals produce more vertical time gestures in Mandarin
than in English. Mandarin speakers can produce past-in-front and past-at-back gestures, whereas CSL deaf signers only exploit past-at-back signs. Mandarin learners of CSL perform more past-at-back gestures than Mandarin-speaking non-signers. In short, cultural, linguistic, and bodily experiences can jointly shape how Chinese people express time creatively in different modalities.
... Cross-linguistic differences in gestures have also been found for spatial frames of reference, e.g., absolute frame of reference (e.g., north, south) versus relative frame of reference (e.g., right, left) (Kita & Özyürek, 2003;Levinson, 2003), spatial expression of time (Kita, 2009) and time metaphors (Bostan, Börütecene, Özcan & Göksun, 2016;Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012;Gu, Mol, Hoetjes & Swerts, 2017;Núñez & Sweetser, 2006). Frequent and recurrent speech and gesture pairings, at different levels of semantic and syntactic encodings within and across languages, have also been used to argue for the existence of multimodal construction units. ...
This paper investigates whether there are changes in gesture rate when speakers of two languages with different gesture rates (Turkish-high gesture; Dutch-low gesture) come into daily contact. We analyzed gestures produced by second-generation heritage speakers of Turkish in the Netherlands in each language, comparing them to monolingual baselines. We did not find differences between bilingual and monolingual speakers, possibly because bilinguals were proficient in both languages and used them frequently-in line with a usage-based approach to language. However, bilinguals produced more deictic gestures than monolinguals in both Turkish and Dutch, which we interpret as a bilingual strategy. Deictic gestures may help organize discourse by placing entities in gesture space and help reduce the cognitive load associated with being bilingual, e.g., inhibition cost. Therefore, gesture rate does not necessarily change in contact situations but might be modulated by frequency of language use, proficiency, and cognitive factors related to being bilingual.
... Cross-linguistic differences in gestures have also been found for spatial frames of reference, e.g., absolute frame of reference (e.g., north, south) versus relative frame of reference (e.g., right, left) (Kita & Özyürek, 2003;Levinson, 2003), spatial expression of time (Kita, 2009) and time metaphors (Bostan, Börütecene, Özcan & Göksun, 2016;Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012;Gu, Mol, Hoetjes & Swerts, 2017;Núñez & Sweetser, 2006). Frequent and recurrent speech and gesture pairings, at different levels of semantic and syntactic encodings within and across languages, have also been used to argue for the existence of multimodal construction units. ...
This paper investigates whether there are changes in gesture rate when speakers of two languages with different gesture rates (Turkish-high gesture; Dutch-low gesture) come into daily contact. We analyzed gestures produced by second-generation heritage speakers of Turkish in the Netherlands in each language, comparing them to monolingual baselines. We did not find differences between bilingual and monolingual speakers, possibly because bilinguals were proficient in both languages and used them frequently – in line with a usage-based approach to language. However, bilinguals produced more deictic gestures than monolinguals in both Turkish and Dutch, which we interpret as a bilingual strategy. Deictic gestures may help organize discourse by placing entities in gesture space and help reduce the cognitive load associated with being bilingual, e.g., inhibition cost. Therefore, gesture rate does not necessarily change in contact situations but might be modulated by frequency of language use, proficiency, and cognitive factors related to being bilingual.
... Despite the fact that there are an increasing number of studies on the relation between speakers' gestures and their spatialisation of time (e.g., Bostan, Börütecene, Özcan & Göksun, 2016;Floyd, 2016;Kita, Danziger & Stolz, 2001;Le Guen & Balam;, we still have an incomplete understanding of why some communities gesture the future to the front whereas others gesture the past to the front. In the research reported here, we investigated this question by exploring the effect of temporal signs on temporal gestures in BIMODAL BILINGUALS, who know both a spoken language and a signed language (Emmorey, Boorin, Thompson & Gollan, 2008). ...
Mandarin speakers often use GESTURES to represent time laterally, vertically, and sagittally. Chinese Sign Language (CSL) users also exploit SIGNS for that purpose, and can differ from the gestures of Mandarin speakers in their choices of axes and direction of sagittal movements. The effects of sign language on co-speech gestures about time were investigated by comparing spontaneous temporal gestures of late bimodal bilinguals (Mandarin learners of CSL) and non-signing Mandarin speakers. Spontaneous gestures were elicited via a wordlist definition task. In addition to effects of temporal words on temporal gestures, results showed significant effects of sign. Compared with non-signers, late bimodal bilinguals (1)produced more sagittal but fewer lateral temporal gestures; and (2) exhibited a different temporal orientation of sagittal gestures, as they were more likely to gesture past events to their back. In conclusion, bodily experience of sign language can not only impact the nature of co-speech gestures, but also spatio-motoric thinking and abstract space-time mappings.
