Asli Ozyurek
Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey.
When we talk about space we frequently use representational hand gestures. These gestures are informationally and temporally related to the accompanying speech (McNeill, 1992). In the literature there has been opposing claims with regard to the origin of these gestures in the speech production process ,such as spatial representations in working memory (Free imagery hypothesis), linguistic representations (Lexical semantic hypothesis) or culture specific schemas. In this talk I address this question by comparing speakers' gestures about the same motion events across different languages (American, Turkish and Japanese) and cultures. The findings show that while some aspects of the motion event gestures change along with linguistic and cultural differences, some other aspects of the same gestures remain same across cultures. These suggest that representational co-speech gestures are generated from an interface mechanism in in which spatial representations interact with and are shaped by linguistic encoding possibilities of the specific language (Interface Hypothesis) as well as by culture specific schemas. At the end of my talk I will propose a speech and gesture production model compatible with the findings.