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.
  • Allen, S., Ozyurek, A., Kita, S., Brown, A., Turanli, R., & Ishizuka, T. (2003). Early speech about manner and path in Turkish and English: Universal or language-specific? In B. Beachley, A. Brown, & F. Conlin (Eds.), Proceedings of the 27th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (pp. 63-72). Somerville (MA): Cascadilla Press.
  • Kita, S., & Ozyurek, A. (2003). What does cross-linguistic variation in semantic coordination of speech and gesture reveal? Evidence for an interface representation of spatial thinking and speaking. Journal of Memory and Language, 48(1), 16-32. doi:10.1016/S0749-596X(02)00505-3.

    Abstract

    Gestures that spontaneously accompany speech convey information coordinated with the concurrent speech. There has been considerable theoretical disagreement about the process by which this informational coordination is achieved. Some theories predict that the information encoded in gesture is not influenced by how information is verbally expressed. However, others predict that gestures encode only what is encoded in speech. This paper investigates this issue by comparing informational coordination between speech and gesture across different languages. Narratives in Turkish, Japanese, and English were elicited using an animated cartoon as the stimulus. It was found that gestures used to express the same motion events were influenced simultaneously by (1) how features of motion events were expressed in each language, and (2) spatial information in the stimulus that was never verbalized. From this, it is concluded that gestures are generated from spatio-motoric processes that interact on-line with the speech production process. Through the interaction, spatio-motoric information to be expressed is packaged into chunks that are verbalizable within a processing unit for speech formulation. In addition, we propose a model of speech and gesture production as one of a class of frameworks that are compatible with the data.
  • Senghas, A., Ozyurek, A., & Kita, S. (2003). Encoding motion events in an emerging sign language: From Nicaraguan gestures to Nicaraguan signs. In A. E. Baker, B. van den Bogaerde, & O. A. Crasborn (Eds.), Crosslinguistic perspectives in sign language research (pp. 119-130). Hamburg: Signum Press.

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