Does language shape silent gesture?

•Gestures, when produced with speech, follow language-specific patterns in event representation.•Gestures, when produced without speech, do not follow language-specific patterns.•Silent gesture provides a window onto a natural semantic organization of events across languages.

Languages differ in how they organize events, particularly in the types of semantic elements they express and the arrangement of those elements within a sentence. Here we ask whether these cross-linguistic differences have an impact on how events are represented nonverbally; more specifically, on how events are represented in gestures produced without speech (silent gesture), compared to gestures produced with speech (co-speech gesture). We observed speech and gesture in 40 adult native speakers of English and Turkish (N = 20/per language) asked to describe physical motion events (e.g., running down a path)—a domain known to elicit distinct patterns of speech and co-speech gesture in English- and Turkish-speakers. Replicating previous work (Kita & Özyürek, 2003), we found an effect of language on gesture when it was produced with speech—co-speech gestures produced by English-speakers differed from co-speech gestures produced by Turkish-speakers. However, we found no effect of language on gesture when it was produced on its own—silent gestures produced by English-speakers were identical in how motion elements were packaged and ordered to silent gestures produced by Turkish-speakers. The findings provide evidence for a natural semantic organization that humans impose on motion events when they convey those events without language.