{"doi":"10.4324/9781003059783-7","title":"Co-speech gesture in bimodal bilinguals","abstract":"The effects of knowledge of sign language on co-speech gesture were investigated by comparing the spontaneous gestures of bimodal bilinguals (native users of American Sign Language and English; n = 13) and non-signing native English speakers (n = 12).Each participant viewed and re-told the Canary Row cartoon to a non-signer whom they did not know.Nine of the thirteen bimodal bilinguals produced at least one ASL sign, which we hypothesise resulted from a failure to inhibit ASL.Compared with non-signers, bimodal bilinguals produced more iconic gestures, fewer beat gestures, and more gestures from a character viewpoint.The gestures of bimodal bilinguals also exhibited a greater variety of handshape types and more frequent use of unmarked handshapes.We hypothesise that these semantic and form differences arise from an interaction between the ASL language production system and the co-speech gesture system.Bimodal bilinguals know both a signed language and a spoken language (Emmorey, Borinstein, Thompson, & Gollan, 2008;Messing, 1999).When bimodal bilinguals talk with each other, they rarely code-switch between sign and speech, but instead produce code-blends in which signs and words are articulated simultaneously (Bishop, 2006;Emmorey et al., 2008).Unlike code-switching, code-blending shares certain properties with co-speech gesture.Specifically, co-speech gestures, like code-blends, are meaningful manual productions that are articulated concurrently with spoken words.In addition, Emmorey et al. (2008) found that code-blends resembled co-speech gesture with respect to synchronous vocal-manual timing and coexpressiveness (in general, the same concept is encoded by signs and words within a codeblend).Given these parallels between bilingual code-blending and co-speech gesture, we investigated whether the nature of co-speech gesture for bimodal bilinguals is affected by their knowledge and use of a signed language.Specifically, we examined the co-speech gestures produced by hearing English speakers who are also native users of American Sign Language (ASL) when they are speaking to someone who does not know any ASL.In this situation bimodal bilinguals are unlikely to code-blend (or to code-switch) because their conversational partner is a non-signer.Previously, in an unpublished master's thesis, Naughton (1996) investigated the co-speech gestures produced by a late-learner of ASL who was paired with an English speaking nonsigner in a conversational dyad in which participants discussed a recent event.Naughton found that the bilingual participant produced a few clearly identifiable ASL signs, even though her conversational partner did not know ASL.The timing of ASL signs matched that of co-speech gesture in that the preparation and stroke often began just before the semantically related word.","journal":"Psychology Press eBooks","year":2020,"id":113857,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":3,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9548,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":false,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":369612,"name":"Karen Emmorey","orcid":"0000-0002-5647-0066","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":537216,"name":"Shannon Casey","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":1,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:13:25.964732Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}