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'Tiny numbers' are actually tiny: Evidence from gestures in the TV News Archive

We report a large-scale, quantitative investigation of manual gestures that speakers perform when speaking metaphorically about numerical quantities. We used the TV News Archive–an online database of over 2 million English language news broadcasts–to examine 681 videos in which 584 speakers used the...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Woodin, Greg, Winter, Bodo, Perlman, Marcus, Littlemore, Jeannette, Matlock, Teenie
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2020
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7671496/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33201907
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242142
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author Woodin, Greg
Winter, Bodo
Perlman, Marcus
Littlemore, Jeannette
Matlock, Teenie
author_facet Woodin, Greg
Winter, Bodo
Perlman, Marcus
Littlemore, Jeannette
Matlock, Teenie
author_sort Woodin, Greg
collection PubMed
description We report a large-scale, quantitative investigation of manual gestures that speakers perform when speaking metaphorically about numerical quantities. We used the TV News Archive–an online database of over 2 million English language news broadcasts–to examine 681 videos in which 584 speakers used the phrase 'tiny number', 'small number', 'large number', or 'huge number', which metaphorically frame numerical quantity in terms of physical size. We found that the gestures speakers used reflect a number of different strategies to express the metaphoric size of quantities. When referring to greater versus lesser quantities, speakers were far more likely to gesture (1) with an open versus closed hand configuration, (2) with an outward versus inward movement, and (3) with a wider distance between the gesturing hands. These patterns were often more pronounced for the phrases containing more extreme adjectives ('tiny/huge number'). However, we did not find that speakers performed two-handed versus one-handed gestures. Nor did we find that speakers performed right-handed versus left-handed gestures, when referring to greater versus lesser quantities. Overall, this work supports the claim that metaphoric thought is involved in the production of verbal metaphors that describe numerical magnitudes. It demonstrates that size-based numerical associations observed in previous lab experiments are active in real-life communication outside the lab.
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spelling pubmed-76714962020-11-19 'Tiny numbers' are actually tiny: Evidence from gestures in the TV News Archive Woodin, Greg Winter, Bodo Perlman, Marcus Littlemore, Jeannette Matlock, Teenie PLoS One Research Article We report a large-scale, quantitative investigation of manual gestures that speakers perform when speaking metaphorically about numerical quantities. We used the TV News Archive–an online database of over 2 million English language news broadcasts–to examine 681 videos in which 584 speakers used the phrase 'tiny number', 'small number', 'large number', or 'huge number', which metaphorically frame numerical quantity in terms of physical size. We found that the gestures speakers used reflect a number of different strategies to express the metaphoric size of quantities. When referring to greater versus lesser quantities, speakers were far more likely to gesture (1) with an open versus closed hand configuration, (2) with an outward versus inward movement, and (3) with a wider distance between the gesturing hands. These patterns were often more pronounced for the phrases containing more extreme adjectives ('tiny/huge number'). However, we did not find that speakers performed two-handed versus one-handed gestures. Nor did we find that speakers performed right-handed versus left-handed gestures, when referring to greater versus lesser quantities. Overall, this work supports the claim that metaphoric thought is involved in the production of verbal metaphors that describe numerical magnitudes. It demonstrates that size-based numerical associations observed in previous lab experiments are active in real-life communication outside the lab. Public Library of Science 2020-11-17 /pmc/articles/PMC7671496/ /pubmed/33201907 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242142 Text en © 2020 Woodin et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Woodin, Greg
Winter, Bodo
Perlman, Marcus
Littlemore, Jeannette
Matlock, Teenie
'Tiny numbers' are actually tiny: Evidence from gestures in the TV News Archive
title 'Tiny numbers' are actually tiny: Evidence from gestures in the TV News Archive
title_full 'Tiny numbers' are actually tiny: Evidence from gestures in the TV News Archive
title_fullStr 'Tiny numbers' are actually tiny: Evidence from gestures in the TV News Archive
title_full_unstemmed 'Tiny numbers' are actually tiny: Evidence from gestures in the TV News Archive
title_short 'Tiny numbers' are actually tiny: Evidence from gestures in the TV News Archive
title_sort 'tiny numbers' are actually tiny: evidence from gestures in the tv news archive
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7671496/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33201907
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242142
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