People use spatial metaphors to talk about temporal concepts.They also gesture frequently during speech. Thecharacteristics of these gestures give information regardingthe mental timelines people form to experience time. Thepresent study investigates the expression of temporal conceptson a natural setting with Turkish speakers. We found thatTurkish speakers used more metaphoric temporal phrases(e.g., short period, time flies quickly) than words referring totime without spatial content (e.g., today, nowadays) in asession where they talked about people’s fortune.Spontaneous gestures were mainly classified as metaphoricand beat gestures and were mostly produced on the sagittalaxis, which contradicts with the previous findings. Yet, wealso found that people used vertical axis to represent currentand future events. These findings suggest that lateral axis maynot always be the most common direction for co-speechtemporal gesture use, and the pragmatic constraints of theenvironment may influence the spatial conceptualization oftime.

We investigated (1) how focal brain-injured patients describe causal events (causal verb like “push” and the instrument of the action like “the stick”) in speech and co-speech gestures and (2) whether gestures compensate for their impaired verbalization. 16 left hemisphere damaged (LHD), 16 right hemisphere damaged (RHD) and 14 controls were asked to describe causal events (22 video clips). The correct use of causal action components in speech and iconic gestures referring to these actions were coded. Results indicated that LHD patients were less accurate in using both components in speech compared to RHD and controls. There was no difference in the number of iconic gestures among groups. Yet, LHD patients were more likely to omit or misuse both components in speech and in gesture than RHD and controls. Particularly, damage to the left inferior and middle frontal gyrus resulted in problems in both modalities, suggesting conceptual deficits of causality.