{"pk":30197,"title":"Co-speech gestures reflect non-linguistic thinking: evidence from mental abacus","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Why do people gesture when they speak? On one proposal, people gesture because they speak: Gestures reflect speechproduction processes. Alternatively, people gesture because they think: Gestures reflect non-linguistic thinking processes.If gestures during speech grow out of thinking, not simply speaking, then co-speech gestures should look similar to thegestures that are produced during silent thinking without speech. Here, we looked at spontaneous gestures during mentalabacus, a non-linguistic technique for rapid arithmetic operations via imagining moving beads on an abacus. We comparedhow expert mental abacus users spontaneously gesture during silent thinking (no-speech) and during explaining how theysolved the arithmetic problems (speech). In both the speech and the no-speech condition, gestures reflected operations ona mental abacus in the same way (e.g. depicting the trajectory of beads). These results suggest that at least some co-speechgestures grow out of thinking processes that are independent of speaking.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[],"section":"Member Abstracts, appearing in proceedings only","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5xp2j4kh","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Yamur","middle_name":"Deniz","last_name":"Ksa","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Chicago","department":""},{"first_name":"Neon","middle_name":"","last_name":"Brooks","name_suffix":"","institution":"Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research","department":""},{"first_name":"Susan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Goldin-Meadow","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Chicago","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/30197/galley/20051/download/"}]}