Asli Ozyurek

Publications

Displaying 1 - 5 of 5
  • Ozyurek, A., Kita, S., Allen, S., Furman, R., & Brown, A. (2005). How does linguistic framing of events influence co-speech gestures? Insights from crosslinguistic variations and similarities. Gesture, 5(1/2), 219-240.

    Abstract

    What are the relations between linguistic encoding and gestural representations of events during online speaking? The few studies that have been conducted on this topic have yielded somewhat incompatible results with regard to whether and how gestural representations of events change with differences in the preferred semantic and syntactic encoding possibilities of languages. Here we provide large scale semantic, syntactic and temporal analyses of speech- gesture pairs that depict 10 different motion events from 20 Turkish and 20 English speakers. We find that the gestural representations of the same events differ across languages when they are encoded by different syntactic frames (i.e., verb-framed or satellite-framed). However, where there are similarities across languages, such as omission of a certain element of the event in the linguistic encoding, gestural representations also look similar and omit the same content. The results are discussed in terms of what gestures reveal about the influence of language specific encoding on on-line thinking patterns and the underlying interactions between speech and gesture during the speaking process.
  • Senghas, A., Ozyurek, A., & Kita, S. (2005). [Response to comment on Children creating core properties of language: Evidence from an emerging sign language in Nicaragua]. Science, 309(5731), 56c-56c. doi:10.1126/science.1110901.
  • Kuntay, A., & Ozyurek, A. (2002). Joint attention and the development of the use of demonstrative pronouns in Turkish. In B. Skarabela, S. Fish, & A. H. Do (Eds.), Proceedings of the 26th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 336-347). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
  • Ozyurek, A. (2002). Do speakers design their co-speech gestures for their addresees? The effects of addressee location on representational gestures. Journal of Memory and Language, 46(4), 688-704. doi:10.1006/jmla.2001.2826.

    Abstract

    Do speakers use spontaneous gestures accompanying their speech for themselves or to communicate their message to their addressees? Two experiments show that speakers change the orientation of their gestures depending on the location of shared space, that is, the intersection of the gesture spaces of the speakers and addressees. Gesture orientations change more frequently when they accompany spatial prepositions such as into and out, which describe motion that has a beginning and end point, rather than across, which depicts an unbounded path across space. Speakers change their gestures so that they represent the beginning and end point of motion INTO or OUT by moving into or out of the shared space. Thus, speakers design their gestures for their addressees and therefore use them to communicate. This has implications for the view that gestures are a part of language use as well as for the role of gestures in speech production.
  • Ozyurek, A. (2002). Speech-gesture relationship across languages and in second language learners: Implications for spatial thinking and speaking. In B. Skarabela, S. Fish, & A. H. Do (Eds.), Proceedings of the 26th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 500-509). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

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