Language & Cognition seminar - Dr Bodo Winter

Spatial-numerical thought revealed through language, gesture, and graphsSpatial-numerical thought revealed through language, gesture, and graphs

Decades worth of research have shown that numerical thought is connected to spatial thought. In this talk, I will look at interactions between space and number as they are revealed through the gestures that people produce when people use such expressions as ‘rising prices’ and ‘tiny numbers’. An analysis of data from more than 500 speakers shows that when adults speakers in the TV News talk about numbers in a spatial fashion, they disproportionately gesture. In addition to this corpus analysis of naturally occurring gestures, I will report on a series of experiments that look at how the choice of vertical versus horizontal axes in data visualizations interacts with conceptual metaphors and linguistic factors. I will conclude my talk by giving a brief overview of my upcoming Future Leader Fellowship project that focuses on the multimodal communication of numerical information.