Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Verbs in progressive aspect can be used for different motion phases of people or objects. For example, “A cat is falling” can describe either the beginning of, or on-going, or the ending of the falling of the cat. Then do people spontaneously use different co-speech gestures according to different motion phases when they use the same progressive verb in speech? This study investigated Japanese speakers’ co-speech gestures used with a progressive verb in Japanese (verb + progressive morpheme -teiru), focusing on the paths of produced gestures. The paths were analyzed according to the direction (vertical or horizontal) or trajectory (arc or straight). The results showed that the participants’ use of co-speech gestures differed when they expressed different motion phases (beginning or ending). The study suggests that gestures can compensate the motion phases of agents that may not be described by language.