Abstract
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.
Highlights
English speakers often talk about quantities in terms of physical size [1, 2] For instance, numbers of different magnitudes are typically described using size terms such as ’tiny’, ’small’, ’large’, and ’huge’, and changing quantities can be characterised as ’shrinking’ or ’growing’
Much of the research on spatial-numerical association has focused on axial representations [2, 19, 20], but here we focus on the gestures that occur with linguistic expressions of size, the metaphoric phrases ’tiny number’, ’small number’, ’large number’, and ’huge number’
We began by downloading a list of URLs for 3200 videos selected at random from the TV News Archive that contained the phrases ’tiny number’, ‘small number’, ‘large number’, and ’huge number’ (800 videos per phrase), including plural phrases (e.g., ’huge numbers’) and phrases interrupted by fillers (e.g., ’tiny erm number’)
Summary
English speakers often talk about quantities in terms of physical size [1, 2] For instance, numbers of different magnitudes are typically described using size terms such as ’tiny’, ’small’, ’large’, and ’huge’, and changing quantities can be characterised as ’shrinking’ or ’growing’. When people reach for blocks with numbers written on them, they spontaneously widen their grip aperture between index finger and thumb if the number is greater, regardless of the actual size of the blocks [10]. These studies show that thinking about greater numbers is mentally connected with actions used for interacting with larger objects, whereas thinking about lesser numbers is mentally connected with actions used for interacting with smaller objects
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