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

• DOI: 10.1037/0012-1649.44.4.1040
• Publication Date: 2008-07-07T15:32:57Z
• Authors: Asli Özyürek; Sotaro Kita; Shanley Allen; Amanda Brown; Reyhan Furman; Tomoko Ishizuka
• Keywords: Variation (astronomy)

The way adults express manner and path components of a motion event varies across typologically different languages both in speech cospeech gestures, showing that language specificity encoding influences gesture.The authors tracked when how this multimodal cross-linguistic variation develops children learning Turkish English, 2 distinct languages.They found learn to speak language-specific ways from age 3 onward (i.e., English speakers used 1 clause clauses path).In contrast, English-and Turkish-speaking children's gestures looked similar at ages 5 separate for path), differing each other only 9 adulthood gesture, but path).The argue pattern the development reflects gradual shift representations during speaking shows looking alone may not be sufficient understand full process acquisition.