Metaphoric gestures: Towards grounded mental spaces

Abstract

Gestures are related to the mental states and unfolding processes of thought, reasoning and verbal language production. This is especially apparent in the case of metaphors and metaphoric gestures. For example, talking about the importance of an idea by calling it a big idea and gesturing to indicate that large size is a manifestation of the use of metaphors in language and gesture. We propose a computational model of the influence of conceptual metaphors on gestures that maps from mental state representations of ideas to their expression in concrete, physical metaphoric gestures. This model relies on conceptual primary metaphors to map the abstract elements of the mental space to concrete physical elements that can be conveyed with gestures. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.