Cross-cultural transfer in gesture frequency in Chinese-English bilinguals

摘要

The purpose of this paper is to examine cross-cultural differences in gesture frequency and the extent to which exposure to two cultures would affect the gesture frequency of bilinguals when speaking in both languages. The Chinesespeaking monolinguals from China, English-speaking monolinguals from America, and Chinese_English bilinguals from Singapore were videotapedwhile retelling two stories, and their speech and gestures were coded. The bilinguals retold the stories twice, once in Mandarin_Chinese and once in English. We looked at both representational (iconic gestures and abstract deictic gestures) and nonrepresentational gestures (speech beats, emblems, and concrete deictic gestures) and calculated the number of gestures per clause for each speaker. The English monolinguals overall produced more representational and nonrepresentational gestures than the Chinese monolinguals, suggesting that American culture is a relatively high-gesture culture and Chinese culture is a relatively lowgesture culture. When speaking in English, the bilinguals resembled the English monolinguals regarding the frequency of both representational and nonrepresentational gestures. When speaking in Mandarin-Chinese, the bilinguals produced more representational gestures than the Chinese monolinguals but more or less the same number of representational gestures as the English monolinguals. In contrast, the bilinguals and the Chinese monolinguals produced similar number of nonrepresentational gestures. Thus, gesture frequency of representational gestures (but not that of nonrepresentational gestures) seems to transfer from English to Chinese, suggesting the closely intertwined relationship of representational gestures and accompanying speech.