Researcher:
Özer, Demet

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PhD Student

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Demet

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Özer

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Özer, Demet

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2017 - 201932020 - 20224

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    Gesture in the aging brain
    (Amer Psychological Assoc, 2022) Akbiyik, Seda; Department of Psychology; N/A; Göksun, Tilbe; Özer, Demet; Faculty Member; PhD Student; Department of Psychology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities; 47278; N/A
    This chapter focuses on all four categories of co-speech gesture such as iconic, metaphoric, deictic, and beat. It reviews the impact of aging on general language and cognitive abilities and how they might relate to gesture use and comprehension in older adults in light of different gesture theories. The chapter addresses gesture use and comprehension in the aging brain and the effects on these processes of declines in cognitive skills such as verbal fluency, spatial and motor skills, and working memory. It focuses on gesture use and comprehension in neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, semantic dementia, and Parkinson's disease to provide further evidence about the mechanisms underlying gesture's role in cognition. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of these findings given that the functions of gestures can alter on the basis of the population being studied. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)
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    Visual-spatial and verbal abilities differentially affect processing of gestural vs. spoken expressions
    (Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis Ltd, 2020) N/A; N/A; Department of Psychology; Özer, Demet; Göksun, Tilbe; PhD Student; Faculty Member; Department of Psychology; Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/A; 47278
    Listeners are sensitive to speakers' co-speech iconic gestures. Concurrent visual and verbal information compete for attentional resources during multimodal comprehension. The current study examined the role of individual differences in visual-spatial vs. verbal abilities on individuals' differential sensitivity to gestural vs. spoken expressions. Turkish-speaking adults (N = 83) were tested on their sensitivity to concurrent gesture vs. speech in an online task (Kelly, S. D., ozyurek, A., & Maris, E. (2010a). Two sides of the same coin. Psychological Science, 21(2), 260-267) and were administered spatial and verbal working memory measures. Participants were slower and less accurate when gesture and speech were incongruent to one another compared to the baseline condition, in which they expressed congruent information. People with higher spatial working memory capacity were more efficient in processing gestures whereas people with higher verbal working memory capacity were more sensitive to spoken expressions. These suggest that not all people are equally sensitive to co-speech gestures and some people may benefit more from gestures during comprehension.
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    The effects of duration words and spatial-temporal metaphors on perceived duration
    (The Cognitive Science Society, 2017) Kranjec, Alexander; N/A; Department of Psychology; Department of Psychology; Özer, Demet; Balcı, Fuat; Göksun, Tilbe; PhD Student; Faculty Member; Faculty Member; Department of Psychology; Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/A; 51269; 47278
    Subjective duration estimates are positively related to the magnitude of various non-temporal stimuli (e.g. Xuan et al., 2007). Our study investigated whether temporal and spatial magnitude information conveyed by linguistic stimuli would affect perceived duration in a temporal reproduction task. We used time-related words referring to different exact durations (e.g. second; Experiment 1), and spatial-temporal metaphors (e.g. long), referring to indistinct temporal as well as spatial magnitudes (Experiment 2). In both experiments, participants over-reproduced the shorter target duration (2.4 s) and under-reproduced the longer target duration (4.8 s). In Experiment 1, participants under-reproduced the longer target duration more when they saw “week” in the training and “year” in the reproduction. Yet, we did not observe the same semantic magnitude effect in other word pairs either in Experiment 1 or 2. Overall, we did not find supporting evidence for magnitude information conveyed by language affecting subjective time estimates. 
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    The effects of gesture restriction on spatial language in young and elderly adults
    (The Cognitive Science Society, 2017) Malykhina, Katsiaryna; Chatterjee, Anjan; N/A; Department of Psychology; Department of Psychology; Department of Psychology; Özer, Demet; Tansan, Merve; Özer, Ege Ekin; Göksun, Tilbe; PhD Student; Undergraduate Student; Undergraduate Student; Faculty Member; Department of Psychology; Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/A; N/A; N/A; 47278
    There is contradictory evidence on whether speech production gets impaired or enhanced when people are restrained from gesturing. There is also very little research on how this effect can change with aging. The present study sought evidence for these by asking young and elderly adults to describe two different routes on a map in spontaneous speech and when gestures were prohibited. We found that elderly adults produced more spatial language when they were restricted to use gestures compared to their spontaneous speech, whereas young adults produced comparable levels of spatial language in both conditions. Young and elderly adults used comparable levels of gestures in their spontaneous route descriptions. Yet, only young adults' gesture use correlated positively with their spatial language production. Thus, the results of gesture prohibition on speech production are different for young and elderly adults.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Differential roles of gestures on spatial language in neurotypical elderly adults and individuals with focal brain injury
    (Routledge, 2019) Chatterjee, Anjan; Department of Psychology; Göksun, Tilbe; Özer, Demet; Faculty Member; Department of Psychology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities; 47278; N/A
    Gestures might serve communicative functions by supplementing spoken expressions or restorative functions by facilitating speech production. Also, speakers with speech deficits use gestures to compensate for their speech impairments. In this study, we examined gesture use in speakers with and without speech impairments and how spoken spatial expressions changed when gestures were restrained. Six patients with speech problems and with left frontal and/or temporal lesions and 20 neurotypical controls described motion events in 3 different conditions (spontaneous gesture, only speech, and only gesture). In addition to the group analyses, we ran case analyses. Results showed that patients used more gestures compared to controls. Gestures served both communicative and restorative functions for patients whereas controls only used gestures for communicative purposes. Case analyses revealed that there were differential patterns among patients. Overall, gesture production is multifunctional and gestures serve different functions for different populations as well as within a population.
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    Gesture use and processing: a review on individual differences in cognitive resources
    (Frontiers, 2020) Department of Psychology; Özer, Demet; Göksun, Tilbe; Faculty Member; Department of Psychology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; N/A; 47278
    Speakers use spontaneous hand gestures as they speak and think. These gestures serve many functions for speakers who produce them as well as for listeners who observe them. To date, studies in the gesture literature mostly focused on group-comparisons or the external sources of variation to examine when people use, process, and benefit from using and observing gestures. However, there are also internal sources of variation in gesture use and processing. People differ in how frequently they use gestures, how salient their gestures are, for what purposes they produce gestures, and how much they benefit from using and seeing gestures during comprehension and learning depending on their cognitive dispositions. This review addresses how individual differences in different cognitive skills relate to how people employ gestures in production and comprehension across different ages (from infancy through adulthood to healthy aging) from a functionalist perspective. We conclude that speakers and listeners can use gestures as a compensation tool during communication and thinking that interacts with individuals' cognitive dispositions.
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    Gesture use in L1-Turkish and L2-English: evidence from emotional narrative retellings
    (Sage, 2022) Department of Psychology; Göksun, Tilbe; Özer, Demet; Özder, Levent Emir; Faculty Member; Department of Psychology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities; 47278; N/A; N/A
    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 versus L2 and positive versus 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 analysed 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.