Speaker: Rosa Illan Castillo (Universidad de Murcia)
Abstract: In this talk, I will provide an overview of work from our lab that looks specifically at spontaneous co-speech gestures produced by speakers when talking about notions related to addition and subtraction in a television news setting using the NewsScape database. Numbers, arithmetic, and mathematics in general, are sophisticated concepts that developed culturally only in recent human history. They are realized through precise combinations of non-mathematical everyday cognitive mechanisms that make human imagination and abstraction possible. One of these mechanisms is conceptual metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) which allows the conceptualization of abstract entities in terms of grounded bodily experience. Lakoff and Núñez (2000) argue that two central conceptual metaphors underpin concepts of arithmetic: ARITHMETIC IS COLLECTING OBJECTS, views numbers as collections of objects, and arithmetic operations as modifying those collections in specific ways. Under this metaphor, addition is construed in terms of adding objects to a collection, and subtraction is construed in terms of removing objects from a collection. The other metaphor, ARITHMETIC IS MOTION ALONG A PATH, views numbers as points in space, and arithmetic operations as moving from point to point along a path. Under this metaphor, addition is construed in terms of rightwards motion along a line, and subtraction is construed in terms of leftwards motion along a line. Evidence from everyday language can be found for each of these mappings. But how are they expressed through gestures? Alcaraz-Carrión et al. (2022) analyzed 423 co-speech gestures from English speakers in NewsScape and found interesting recurrent patterns following the two central conceptual metaphors for the arithmetic notions of addition and subtraction. I will contrast these data with gestures produced by Spanish speakers in similar contexts, using the NewsScape database, and I will discuss the main cross-linguistic differences found regarding gestural patterns in order to show how the conceptualization of numbers and arithmetic is affected by cultural and, specifically, linguistic aspects, and how this is reflected in gestures.
About Rosa Illan Castillo: Rosa Illan Castillo, is a PhD candidate and Fundación Séneca fellow at the University of Murcia (Spain), where she is developing her doctoral thesis on spatial dynamic construals of time. Currently, Rosa is working on exposing the complexity of the spatial cognition of time by contrasting the blending and transfer models. She is a member of the Daedalus Lab and the Red Hen Lab. She was a visiting researcher at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg in 2021, supervised by Dr Peter Uhrig, and, last year, she was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to develop a one-year research stay in the Department of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego supervised by Prof. Rafael Núñez.
