Türkçe ve İngilizce konuşan iki dillilerde zamansal jestlerin kullanılan dile ve İngilizce yeterliliğine göre karşılaştırılması

We use space to think and talk about time, which is evident in our everyday language with spatial metaphors of time. Along with verbal expressions, our gestures reflect how we conceptualize time spatially, sometimes revealing the patterns not present in language. Previous research investigated the role of conventionality in metaphor processing in both monolingual and bilingual contexts. However, no study compared the same spatial metaphors of time in bilingual context as how we process them. This study examines the differences in processing and gesturing the same metaphors in L1-Turkish and L2-English bilinguals. We asked our participants (n=27) to elaborate on literal and metaphorical sentences with the same spatial words. We found that individuals produced more temporal gestures while explaining L2 metaphors compared to L1 metaphors with more proficient L2 speakers producing fewer temporal gestures especially for the most conventional sentences. Our results also revealed that L2 but not L1 metaphors elicited more bimanual gestures than their literal counterparts. Participants used the lateral and sagittal axes equally frequently while producing temporal gestures and their beat gestures' directions mostly conformed to the metaphorical mappings they expressed in speech. These findings hint at the role of conventionality of metaphors in bilingual metaphor processing and how we produce temporal gestures as we talk about time in terms of space. This research sparks a new line of research, which studies different theories of metaphors together to explore how we process metaphors and produce temporal gestures. Keywords: metaphor, time, temporal gestures, bilingualism