
Seyda OzcaliskanGeorgia State University | GSU · Department of Psychology
Seyda Ozcaliskan
Doctor of Philosophy
Patterns of speech and gesture production across different learners and languages
About
82
Publications
18,603
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
3,077
Citations
Introduction
My research focuses on early linguistic and cognitive abilities as they reveal themselves both in speech and in gesture. Specifically, I investigate whether and how children’s gestures can inform us about developmental change across milestones, with two key questions: (1) does gesture constitute a robust aspect of learning, remaining preserved across different learners (children with blindness, autism, Down syndrome, bilinguals) and languages (Chinese, English, Spanish, Turkish).
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
September 2008 - August 2021
January 2003 - June 2008
Education
September 1996 - December 2002
Publications
Publications (82)
Screen-based media serves as a prominent source of commu- nicative input for children. However, earlier work focused pri- marily on content features of media programming, leaving content expression largely unexamined. In this study, we exam- ined the relationship between content features (educational content, character type, character gender) and c...
Children comprehend iconic gestures relatively later than deictic gestures. Previous research with English‐learning children indicated that they could comprehend iconic gestures at 26 months, a pattern whose extension to other languages is not yet known. The present study examined Turkish‐learning children's iconic gesture comprehension and its rel...
Incarcerated adults in the United States are a vulnerable group with substantially low skills and educational attainment. However, the extent to which various, malleable prison factors are related to the skills of adults from diverse backgrounds remains scarcely explored. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to explore such factors in or...
Speakers of different languages follow a three-way split in how they express motion events in speech—with a greater emphasis on manner in satellite-framed languages (English), path in verb-framed languages (Turkish), and comparable expression of manner and path in equipollently-framed languages (Chinese). According to the thinking-for-speaking acco...
Blind adults display language‐specificity in their packaging and ordering of events in speech. These differences affect the representation of events in co‐speech gesture ––gesturing with speech––but not in silent gesture–– gesturing without speech. Here we examine when in development blind children begin to show adult‐like patterns in co‐speech and...
Purpose
Adults with aphasia gesture more than adults without aphasia. However, less is known about the role of gesture in different discourse contexts for individuals with different types of aphasia. In this study, we asked whether patterns of speech and gesture production of individuals with aphasia vary by aphasia and discourse type and also diff...
Adults display cross-linguistic variability in their speech in how they package and order semantic elements of a motion event. These differences can also be found in speakers’ co-speech gestures (gesturing with speech), but not in their silent gestures (gesturing without speech). Here, we examine when in development children show the differences be...
The expression of physical motion (the spider crawls across the net) and metaphorical motion (the fear crawls across her heart) shows strong inter-typological differences between language types (German, an S-language vs. Spanish, a V-language) and more subtle intra-typological differences within a language type (German vs. Polish, both S-languages)...
Expression of physical motion (e.g., man runs by ) shows systematic variability not only between language types (i.e., inter-typological) but also within a language type (i.e., intra-typological). In this study, we asked whether the patterns of variability extend to metaphorical motion events (e.g., time runs by ). Our analysis of randomly selected...
Speakers of different languages (e.g., English vs. Turkish) show a binary split in how they package and order components of a motion event in speech and co-speech gesture but not in silent gesture (Özçalışkan et al., 2016a). In this study, we focused on Mandarin Chinese, a language that does not follow the binary split in its expression of motion i...
Production and comprehension of gesture emerge early and are key to subsequent language development in typical development. Compared to typically developing (TD) children, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) exhibit difficulties and/or differences in gesture production. However, we do not yet know if gesture production either shows simila...
The expression of motion events has been examined in standard dialects of typologically distinct languages, but the effect of dialect-based variation remains relatively unexamined. The present study focused on Chinese—a relatively understudied language—asking whether patterns of motion expression differed between its two dialects, Mandarin and Baba...
The metaphorical motion of time can be expressed in gesture along either a sagittal axis—with the future ahead and past behind the speaker, or a lateral axis—with the past to the left and future to the right of the speaker (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012). Adult English speakers, when gesturing about time, show a preference for lateral gestures with left...
Languages differ in how they express motion: Languages like English prefer to
conflate manner and path into the same clause and express both elements frequently
while languages like Turkish prefer to express these elements separately, with a
greater preference for the expression of path of motion. While typological patterns are
well-established for...
Children’s early vocabulary shows sex differences—with boys having smaller vocabularies than age-comparable girls—a pattern that becomes evident in both singletons and twins. Twins also use fewer words than their singleton peers. However, we know relatively less about sex differences in early gesturing in singletons or twins, and also how singleton...
Children show sex differences in early speech development, with girls producing a greater number and variety of words at an earlier age than boys (Berglund et al., 2005)—a pattern that also becomes evident in gesture (Butterworth & Morrisetta, 1996). Importantly, parents show variability in how they produce speech when interacting with their single...
Speakers show cross-linguistic differences in expressing placement events involving support (cup on table) and containment (apple in bowl) in first language (L1) contexts. They rely on either more-general (e.g., Spanish for support, Polish for containment) or more-specific (e.g., German, Polish for support; Spanish, German for containment) descript...
Expression of motion shows systematic inter-typological variability between language types, particularly with respect to manner and path components of motion: speakers of satellite-framed languages (S-language; e.g. German) frequently conflate manner and path into a single clause, while verb-framed language speakers (V-language; e.g. Spanish) typic...
The expression of motion shows strong crosslinguistic variability; however, less is known about speakers’ expectancies for lexicalizations of motion at the neural level. We examined event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in native English or Spanish speakers while they read grammatical sentences describing animations involving manner and path compon...
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) produce fewer deictic gestures, accompanied by delays/deviations in speech development, compared to typically-developing (TD) children. We ask whether children with ASD—like TD children—show right-hand preference in gesturing and whether right-handed gestures predict their vocabulary size in speech. Our...
Background
Young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have been shown to differ from typically developing (TD) children in their production of gesture, as well as the relationship between gesture and the content of their speech. In this study, we asked whether older children with ASD continue to differ from TD children in the types of gestu...
Monolingual children identify referents uniquely in gesture before they do so with words, and parents translate these gestures into words. Children benefit from these translations, acquiring the words that their parents translated earlier than the ones that are not translated. Are bilingual children as likely as monolingual children to identify ref...
Children can understand iconic co-speech gestures that characterize entities by age 3 (Stanfield et al. in J Child Lang 40(2):1–10, 2014; e.g., “I’m drinking”  tilting hand in C-shape to mouth as if holding a glass). In this study, we ask whether children understand co-speech gestures that characterize events as early as they do so for entities, a...
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or with Down syndrome (DS) show diagnosis-specific differences from typi- cally developing (TD) children in gesture production. We asked whether these differences reflect the differences in parental gesture input. Our systematic observations of 23 children with ASD and 23 with DS (Mages = 2;6)—compared t...
Speakers of different languages systematically differ in how they package manner and path components of a motion event rendered from a self-motion perspective in both speech and co-speech gesture. Speakers of satellite-framed languages (e.g., German) use a conflated pattern, synthesizing manner and path of motion into a single clause or gesture; wh...
Baby sign but not spontaneous gesture predicts later vocabulary in children with Down Syndrome – CORRIGENDUM - ŞEYDA ÖZÇALIŞKAN*, LAUREN B. ADAMSON, NEVENA DIMITROVA, JHONELLE BAILEY, LAUREN SCHMUCK
Gesture comprehension remains understudied, particularly in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who have difficulties in gesture production. Using a novel gesture comprehension task, Study 1 examined how 2- to 4-year-old typically-developing (TD) children comprehend types of gestures and gesture-speech combinations, and showed better compr...
Children produce iconic gestures conveying action information earlier than the ones conveying attribute information (Özçalışkan, Gentner & Goldin-Meadow, 2014). In this study, we ask whether children’s comprehension of iconic gestures follows a similar pattern, also with earlier comprehension of iconic gestures conveying action. Children, ages 2 to...
Children achieve increasingly complex language milestones initially in gesture or in gesture+speech combinations before they do so in speech, from first words to first sentences. In this study, we ask whether gesture continues to be part of the language-learning process as children begin to develop more complex language skills, namely narratives. A...
This volume offers a unique combination of interdisciplinary research and a comprehensive overview of motion and space studies from a semantic typological perspective. The chapters present cutting-edge research covering central topics such as the status of semantic components in motion event descriptions and their role in typological variation, the...
Children express their burgeoning abilities in referential communication initially in gesture. Parents frequently provide verbal labels for the referents children express only in gesture but not yet in speech, which, in turn boosts children’s subsequent vocabulary development. In this chapter, we ask wheth- er the link between early gesture and ear...
Language development is driven by multiple factors involving both the individual child and the environments that surround the child. The chapters in this volume highlight several such factors as potential contributors to developmental change, including factors that examine the role of immediate social environment (i.e., parent SES, parent and sibli...
Typically developing (TD) children refer to objects uniquely in gesture (e.g., point at cat) before they produce verbal labels for these objects (“cat”; Bates et al., 1979). The onset of such gestures predicts the onset of similar spoken words, showing a strong positive relation between early gestures and early words (Iverson & Goldin‐Meadow, 2005)...
Sighted speakers of different languages vary systematically in how they package and order components of a motion event in speech. These differences influence how semantic elements are organized in gesture, but only when those gestures are produced with speech (co-speech gesture), not without speech (silent gesture). We ask whether the cross-linguis...
The Acquisition of Turkish in Childhood presents recent research on the nature of language acquisition by typically and atypically developing monolingual and bilingual Turkish-speaking children. The book summarises the most recent research findings on the acquisition of Turkish in childhood, with a focus on (i) the acquisition of phonology, morphol...
Typically-developing (TD) children frequently refer to objects uniquely in gesture. Parents translate these gestures into words, facilitating children's acquisition of these words (Goldin-Meadow et al. in Dev Sci 10(6):778-785, 2007). We ask whether this pattern holds for children with autism (AU) and with Down syndrome (DS) who show delayed vocabu...
Research with typically developing children suggests a strong positive relation between early gesture use and subsequent vocabulary development. In this study, we ask whether gesture production plays a similar role for children with autism spectrum disorder. We observed 23 18-month-old typically developing children and 23 30-month-old children with...
Early spontaneous gesture, specifically deictic gesture, predicts subsequent vocabulary development in typically developing (TD) children. Here, we ask whether deictic gesture plays a similar role in predicting later vocabulary size in children with Down Syndrome (DS), who have been shown to have difficulties in speech production, but strengths in...
Languages show typological variation in the expression of manner versus path of motion. However, studies examining the effects of these differences on cognitive representations of motion have led to inconclusive results. To elucidate this prior work, the present study examines word-learning outcomes for adult English speakers who were exposed to ne...
Languages differ in how they organize events, particularly in the types of semantic elements they express and the arrangement of those elements within a sentence. Here we ask whether these cross-linguistic differences have an impact on how events are represented nonverbally; more specifically, on how events are represented in gestures produced with...
Speakers of all languages gesture, but there are differences in the gestures that they produce. Do speakers learn language-specific gestures by watching others gesture or by learning to speak a particular language? We examined this question by studying the speech and gestures produced by 40 congenitally blind adult native speakers of English and Tu...
When do the gestures
do
and
do not
follow the patterns of the language one speaks? We examined this question by studying 10 Turkish-English bilingual adults (Turkish as L1) in comparison to 10 monolingual English and 10 monolingual Turkish adults as they described motion events either in speech with gesture (co-speech gesture) or only in gesture wi...
Expression of spatial motion shows wide variation as well as patterned regularities across the world’s languages (Talmy, 2000), and events involving the traversal of a spatial boundary impose the tightest typological constraints in the lexicalization of motion, providing a true test of cross-linguistic differences. Speakers of verb-framed languages...
Languages differ in how they organize events, particularly in the types of semantic elements they express and the arrangement of those elements within a sentence. Here we ask whether these cross-linguistic differences have an impact on how events are represented nonverbally; more specifically, on how events are represented in gestures produced with...
Children use gesture to refer to objects before they produce labels for these objects and gesture-speech combinations to convey semantic relations between objects before conveying sentences in speech-a trajectory that remains largely intact across children with different developmental profiles. Can the developmental changes that we observe in child...
Metaphor plays a unique role in cognitive development by structuring abstract concepts and leading to conceptual change. Existing work suggests early emergence of metaphorical abilities, with five-year-olds understanding and explaining metaphors that involve cross-domain comparisons (e.g., SPACE to TIME). Yet relatively little is known about the fa...
ABSTRACT Children understand gesture+speech combinations in which a deictic gesture adds new information to the accompanying speech by age 1;6 (Morford & Goldin-Meadow, 1992; 'push'+point at ball). This study explores how early children understand gesture+speech combinations in which an iconic gesture conveys additional information not found in the...
Children produce a deictic gesture for a particular object (point at dog) approximately three months before they produce the verbal label for that object ("dog") (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). Gesture thus paves the way for children's early nouns. We ask here whether the same pattern-gesture preceding and predicting speech-holds for iconic gestur...
ABSTRACT Children with pre/perinatal unilateral brain lesions (PL) show remarkable plasticity for language development. Is this plasticity characterized by the same developmental trajectory that characterizes typically developing (TD) children, with gesture leading the way into speech? We explored this question, comparing eleven children with PL -...
Metaphor plays a unique role in cognitive development by structuring abstract concepts and leading to conceptual change. Existing work suggests early emergence of metaphorical abilities, with five-year-olds understanding and explaining metaphors that involve cross-domain comparisons (e.g., SPACE to TIME). Yet relatively little is known about the fa...
ABSTRACT Time is frequently expressed with spatial motion, using one of three different metaphor types: moving-time, moving-ego, and sequence-as-position. Previous work shows that children can understand and explain moving-time metaphors by age five (Özçalışkan, 2005). In this study, we focus on all three metaphor types for time, and ask whether me...
Gestures are ubiquitous and natural in our everyday life. They convey information about culture, discourse, thought, intentionality, emotion, intersubjectivity, cognition, and first and second language acquisition. Additionally, they are used by non-human primates to communicate with their peers and with humans. Consequently, the modern field of ge...
Previous research has shown that children understand the iconicity of a gesture at 26 months. Here we ask when children begin to display an appreciation of iconicity in the gestures they produce. We observed spontaneous gesture in 40 children interacting with their parents from 14 to 34 months of age and found that children increased their producti...
Children differ in how quickly they reach linguistic milestones. Boys typically produce their first multi-word sentences later than girls do. We ask here whether there are sex differences in children's gestures that precede, and presage, these sex differences in speech. To explore this question, we observed 22 girls and 18 boys every 4 months as th...
Commenting on perceptual similarities between objects stands out as an important linguistic achievement, one that may pave the way towards noticing and commenting on more abstract relational commonalities between objects. To explore whether having a conventional linguistic system is necessary for children to comment on different types of similarity...
At the one-word stage children use gesture to supplement their speech ('eat'+point at cookie), and the onset of such supplementary gesture-speech combinations predicts the onset of two-word speech ('eat cookie'). Gesture thus signals a child's readiness to produce two-word constructions. The question we ask here is what happens when the child begin...
Children vary widely in how quickly their vocabularies grow. Can looking at early gesture use in children and parents help us predict this variability? We videotaped 53 English-speaking parent-child dyads in their homes during their daily activities for 90-minutes every four months between child age 14 and 34 months. At 42 months, children were giv...
This paper examines comprehension of metaphorical motion (e.g., "time flies by") among 4- and 5-year-old children, who are learning English or Turkish as their native language. Results show both cross-linguistic similarities and differences. In both languages, children can understand metaphors embedded in stories by age 4, and provide verbal explan...
The types of gesture+speech combinations children produce during the early stages of language development change over time. This change, in turn, predicts the onset of two-word speech and thus might reflect a cognitive transition that the child is undergoing. An alternative, however, is that the change merely reflects changes in the types of gestur...
Children who produce one word at a time often use gesture to supplement their speech, turning a single word into an utterance that conveys a sentence-like meaning ('eat'+point at cookie). Interestingly, the age at which children first produce supplementary gesture-speech combinations of this sort reliably predicts the age at which they first produc...
Situated within the framework of the conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999), this study investigated young children's understanding of metaphorical extensions of spatial motion. Metaphor was defined as a conceptual-linguistic mapping between a source and a target domain. The study focused on metaphors that are structured by the source...
Earlier work on literal motion has shown that English and Turkish belong to typologically distinct classes of languages, with English speakers paying greater linguistic attention to the manner dimension of motion events (e.g., Ozcaliskan and Slobin 1999a, 2003). As a further step, this article investigates whether typological differences hold true...
The paper compares two typologically distinct languages with regard to their lexicalization patterns in encoding metaphorical motion events: (1) verb-framed (V-language, represented by Turkish), in which the preferred pattern for framing motion events is the use of a path verb with an optional manner adjunct (e.g.,
enter running
), and (2) satellit...
Situated within the framework of the conceptual metaphor theory, this article examines universal versus language-specific patterns in metaphorical motion event descriptions, comparing English and Turkish. The analysis focused on the crosslinguistic similarities and differences in the target domains and the types of metaphorical mappings that are st...
This article examines the metaphorical structure of the domains of death, life, sickness, body, and time in Turkish. The analysis was conducted within the framework of the conceptual metaphor theory, and it tested the universal applicability of the metaphorical mappings outlined for English in the aforementioned conceptual domains. The data came fr...
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.