Why gestures are relevant to the bilingual mental lexicon
Författare
Redaktör
- Aneta Pavlenko
Summary, in English
Gestures, the symbolic movements speakers perform while they speak, are systematically related to speech and language in non-trivial ways. This chapter presents an overview of what gestures can and cannot tell us about the monolingual and the bilingual mental lexicon. Gesture analysis opens for a broader view of the mental lexicon, targeting the interface between conceptual, semantic and syntactic aspects of event construal, and offers new possibilities for examining how languages co-exist and interact in bilinguals beyond the level of surface forms. The first section of this chapter gives a brief introduction to gesture studies and outlines the current views on the relationship between gesture, speech, and language. The second section targets the key questions for the study of the monolingual and bilingual lexicon, and illustrates the methods employed for addressing these questions. It further exemplifies systematic cross-linguistic patterns in gestural behaviour in monolingual and bilingual contexts. The final section discusses some implications of an expanded view of the multilingual lexicon that includes gesture, and outlines directions for future inquiry.
Publiceringsår
2009
Språk
Engelska
Sidor
161-184
Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie
The bilingual mental lexicon: Interdisciplinary approaches
Dokumenttyp
Del av eller Kapitel i bok
Förlag
Multilingual Matters
Ämne
- General Language Studies and Linguistics
Nyckelord
- lexicon
- gesture
- second language acquisition
- bilingualism
Status
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt
- ISBN: 9781847691255