Handing out novel metaphors: Gesture use in explanations by L1-Turkish and L2-English bilinguals

When thinking and talking about unfamiliar metaphoric ideas, we may use our hands as concrete anchors for abstract meaning. This thesis used metaphors constructed with verbs versus nouns to investigate the use of co-speech gestures during verbal explanations of bilingual adults in both their languages (L1-Turkish, L2-English). Gestures produced during metaphor explanations were compared to those used in matched literal sentences. We asked our participants (n = 41) to explain matched sets of motion-related sentences in English and Turkish and asked for sentence-level ratings for each. Participants also completed measures of English proficiency (objective and subjective) and mental imagery skills. We coded spontaneous gestures by type (representational and beat) and analyzed their frequency relative to speech length. Results showed that participants gestured more in Turkish than in English, regardless of gesture type. Metaphors elicited more beat gestures than literal sentences, and verb-based sentences elicited more representational gestures than noun-based ones. Participants gestured more for sentences they reported to be more familiar with than unfamiliar ones. These findings suggest that gesture use varies across language and sentence type in a way that reflects how bilinguals manage processing effort in the context of complex linguistic, conceptual, and task-related demands, rather than isolated metaphor comprehension processes.