Language contact does not drive gesture transfer: Heritage speakers maintain 
language specific gesture patterns in each language

Azar, Zeynep; Backus, Ad; Ozyurek, Asli

doi:10.1017/S136672891900018X

Item

ITEM ACTIONSEXPORT

Add to Basket

Local TagsRelease HistoryDetailsSummary

Released

Journal Article

Language contact does not drive gesture transfer: Heritage speakers maintain language specific gesture patterns in each language

MPS-Authors

/persons/resource/persons142

Ozyurek, Asli
Center for Language Studies , External Organizations;
Research Associates, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, External Organizations;
Multimodal Language and Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen, External Organizations;

External Resource

No external resources are shared

Fulltext (restricted access)

There are currently no full texts shared for your IP range.

Fulltext (public)

Azar_Backus_Ozyurek_2020_Language contact does not drive....pdf
(Publisher version), 492KB

Supplementary Material (public)

There is no public supplementary material available

Citation

Azar, Z., Backus, A., & Ozyurek, A. (2020). Language contact does not drive gesture transfer: Heritage speakers maintain language specific gesture patterns in each language. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 23(2), 414-428. doi:10.1017/S136672891900018X.

Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-0003-2193-1

Abstract

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.