How do people conceptualize motion events and talk about
them? The current study examines how gestural
representations of motion events arise from linguistic
expressions in Persian, which has characteristics of both
Talmy’s satellite- and verb-framed languages. We examined
native Persian speakers’ speech and gestures in describing 20
motion events. We focused on two motion event components:
path (trajectory of motion like up) and manner (how the
action is performed like jumping). Results indicated that when
expressing motion, Persian speakers produced path in both
speech and gesture, whereas manner was conveyed only
through speech (mostly as adverbs). Additionally, dynamic
gestures tended to occur in the same order they were uttered.
The difference between path and manner findings asks for
further research to examine language-gesture interaction in
detail among different languages. Results also suggest
refinement in gesture theories that argue for one-to-one
correspondence between speech and gesture
