Presentations

Abstract

Gestures frequently accompany speech in expressing abstract domains such as negation. While gesture-negation interactions have been widely studied, most research has focused on SVO languages with pre-verbal negation (e.g., I did NOT sleep). Turkish provides a unique case with its SOV word order, agglutinative morphology, and post-verbal negation marker -MA/-ME (e.g., Ben eve git-ME-dim ‘I did not go home’), which is also prestressing. Previous studies in Turkish have focused on prosodic and semantic aspects of negation, leaving the temporal dynamics of gestures accompanying unexplored. This study examines how gestures temporally align with -MA/-ME, the verb, and the preceding arguments. We hypothesize that due to Turkish's post-verbal negation, gestures accompanying -MA/-ME systematically precede its onset, reflecting anticipatory alignment. Special attention is given to the backwards hand flip, a culturally specific negation-related gesture in Turkish (as well as in Turkish Sign Language). A corpus of free-spoken dialogues on YouTube was analyzed using ELAN. A total of 211 instances of -MA/-ME were drawn from YouTube videos featuring 87 speakers. Gestures were annotated using ELAN and categorized into manual (backwards hand flips), non-manual (e.g., backwards head tilt), and combined gestures. Gestures appeared in 84.8% of cases (179 out of 211). Among these, 40.2% featured backwards hand flips in isolation, 35.8% combined manual with non-manual gestures, and 15.6% had only non-manual gestures. As manual gestures constituted the majority of cases, temporal analysis focused on backwards hand flips (alone and with non-manual gestures), which preceded -MA/-ME in 87% of cases and with an average lead time of 648 milliseconds (which overlapped with the preceding verb and arguments). These findings highlight how gestures shape post-verbal negation in Turkish, offering insights into possible role of prediction in gesture-speech integration and contributing to future cross-linguistic multimodal research.

Abstract

Discourse markers (DMs, henceforth) are widely accepted
across frameworks as serving key interactional functions,
among them topicality management in interaction, aiding
speakers in navigating the conversational flow and discourse
progression. However, the body of evidence supporting the
claim that these devices serve as cues to signal maintenance of
discourse continuity or topic shift to the interlocutor is primarily
theoretical and corpus-based, providing only limited insights into
the cognitive mechanisms involved. This study provides neural
evidence for the processing of three turn-initial Spanish DM
configurations: “y” (‘and’), perceived lengthened “y” (‘and’), and
“bueno y” (‘well and’) and their alleged role as cues for continuity
(the former) and discontinuity (the latter two). Participants (n =
30) of both Latin American and Peninsular varieties underwent
EEG recording while passively listening to short three-turn
dialogues (6 lists × 60 trials, Latin-square design), with critical
utterances either continuing on the same topic or introducing a
new topic, each preceded by one of three target DMs. Statistical
analyses were conducted, focusing on the typical central-
parietal topographical distribution of the N400 component in two
time windows: 450–650 ms post-stimulus onset and 700–950
ms post-critical word onset. The first analysis, assessing core
processing effects of DMs, revealed a significant main effect of
DM (p < 0.001). Pairwise comparisons showed significant
differences between “bueno y” and “y” (p < 0.001), and between
“bueno y” and the perceived lengthened “y” (p < 0.001), but not
between “y” and its perceived lengthened version (p = 1.000).
The second analysis explored cognitive load in response to
matching or mismatching expectations of discourse topicality set
by the initial DM. No significant main effects of DM (p = 0.594),
topic (p = 0.576) or DM × topic interaction (p = 0.814) were
observed. Results from the first time window suggest that these
devices encode specific pragmatic information and processing
instructions, therefore generating distinct discourse
expectations that translate into different processing efforts.
Mean amplitudes of DMs revealed “y” and perceived lengthened
“y” elicited similarly reduced N400s, aligned with continuity
processing, whereas “bueno y” elicited larger negativity,
suggesting greater processing demands, likely prompting the
anticipation of topic shifts. Findings for the second time window
suggest that topic shifts, while detected, may not consistently
disrupt local semantic integration processes. One possible
explanation is that the topic shifts presented were not disjunctive
enough to elicit pronounced N400 responses when content
contradicted expectations set by the markers. Overall, our
results suggest that DM processing primarily modulates early
predictive mechanisms, setting up initial expectations, while
continuations are flexibly incorporated into the evolving
discourse model without incurring costly processing efforts. This dissociation between early DM effects and later integration
challenges the theoretical assumption that the studied DMs
directly signal topic (dis)continuity in upcoming discourse.