EXPRESS: Gesture use in L1-Turkish and L2-English: Evidence from emotional narrative retellings

Bilinguals tend to produce more co-speech hand gestures to compensate for reduced communicative proficiency when speaking in their L2. We here investigated L1-Turkish and L2-English speakers’ gesture use in an emotional context. We specifically asked whether and how (1) speakers gestured differently while retelling L1 vs. L2 and positive vs. negative narratives, and (2) gesture production during retellings was associated with speakers’ later subjective emotional intensity ratings of those narratives. We asked 22 participants to read and then retell eight emotion-laden narratives (half positive, half negative; half Turkish, half English). We analyzed gesture frequency during the entire retelling and during emotional speech only (i.e., gestures that co-occur with emotional phrases such as “happy”). Our results showed that participants produced more representational gestures in L2 than in L1, however, they used more representational gestures during emotional content in L1 than in L2. Participants also produced more co-emotional speech gestures when retelling negative than positive narratives, regardless of language, and more beat gestures co-occurring with emotional speech in negative narratives in L1. Furthermore, using more gestures when retelling a narrative was associated with increased emotional intensity ratings for narratives. Overall, these findings suggest that (1) bilinguals might use representational gestures to compensate for reduced linguistic proficiency in their L2, (2) speakers use more gestures to express negative emotional information, particularly during emotional speech, and (3) gesture production may enhance the encoding of emotional information, which subsequently leads to the intensification of emotion perception.