Abstract
Two experiments on the role of hand gestures in recall of English words suggested that hand gestures images were effective in recalling both concrete and abstract words. The hand gestures which corresponded to each word were mainly modeled after American Sign Language signs. As the words and the gestures had the same conceptual structures, it was considered that the gestures' images visualized the concepts of the words and activated memory. Mental imagery is now considered to consist of a depictive side and a descriptive side. That means that you cannot distinguish the depictive side from the descriptive side, or 'mental pictures' from 'propositions'. According to cognitive semantics, mental concepts are produced based on image schemes or abstract conceptual frames which are extracted and acquired from physical experiences in the world, and especially abstract concepts are formed through the process of using the image schemes metaphorically. The present study showed the abstract words and the gestures shared the same image schemes and metaphorical structures. So we assume that the gestures which shared the same conceptual structures with the words facilitated the recall of the English words which they corresponded to.
