Table 1.
Speech and gesture strings produced by Turkish, English, Spanish, and Chinese speakers categorized according to their fits to predominant orders
| Types of actions described | Speech strings† |
Gesture strings‡ |
||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Predominant speech order | Proportion consistent with speech order |
Predominant gesture order | Proportion consistent with gesture order |
Proportion consistent with speech order§ |
||||||||
| Mean | SE | Mean | SE | Mean | SE | |||||||
| Actors, acts (intransitive) | ||||||||||||
| In-place and crossing-space actions | ||||||||||||
| Turkish speakers | Ar | A | 1.00 | (0.00) | Ar | A | 0.85 | (0.10) | ||||
| Chinese speakers | Ar | A | 1.00 | (0.00) | Ar | A | 0.98 | (0.01) | ||||
| English speakers | Ar | A | 1.00 | (0.00) | Ar | A | 0.99 | (0.01) | ||||
| Spanish speakers | Ar | A | 0.94 | (0.03) | Ar | A | 0.97 | (0.02) | ||||
| Actors, patients, acts (transitive) | ||||||||||||
| In-place actions | ||||||||||||
| Turkish speakers | Ar | P | A | 0.97 | (0.02) | Ar | P | A | 1.00 | (0.00) | ||
| Chinese speakers | Ar | A | P | 0.88 | (0.04) | Ar | P | A | 0.84 | (0.06) | 0.30 | (0.09)* |
| English speakers | Ar | A | P | 0.98 | (0.01) | Ar | P | A | 0.90 | (0.03) | 0.20 | (0.06)* |
| Spanish speakers | Ar | A | P | 0.92 | (0.05) | Ar | P | A | 0.86 | (0.05) | 0.34 | (0.06)* |
| Crossing-space actions | ||||||||||||
| Turkish speakers | Ar | P | A | 0.93 | (0.04) | Ar | P | A | 0.69 | (0.13) | ||
| Chinese speakers | Ar | P | A | 0.80 | (0.06) | Ar | P | A | 0.90 | (0.08) | ||
| English speakers | Ar | A | P | 0.88 | (0.10) | Ar | P | A | 0.78 | (0.08) | 0.21 | (0.07)* |
| Spanish speakers | Ar | A | P | 0.86 | (0.05) | Ar | P | A | 0.87 | (0.04) | 0.13 | (0.07)* |
Gestures were produced in place of speech and thus were not accompanied by any speech at all.
*, P < 0.0001, comparing proportion of gesture strings consistent with gesture order vs. speech order.
†Proportions were calculated by taking the number of spoken sentences a participant produced that were consistent with the predominant speech order and dividing that number by the total number of spoken sentences the participant produced to describe the target event.
‡Proportions were calculated by taking the number of gesture strings a participant produced that were consistent with the predominant gesture order or the predominant speech order and dividing that number by the total number of gesture strings the participant produced to describe the target event. Participants did not always produce gestures for all three elements when describing transitive actions (see Table S1). When ArA strings were produced for a transitive action, we counted those strings as consistent with the predominant order for gesture and speech and thus included them in the numerator for both proportions.
§A blank cell indicates that the predominant gesture order is identical to the predominant speech order for that language group.