Natural Disasters elicit spontaneous multimodal iconicity in onomatopoeia & gesture
Channel: ICLDC YT
Date: 2021-05-04

Natural Disasters elicit spontaneous multimodal iconicity in onomatopoeia & gesture: Earthquake narratives from Nepal and New Zealand
Lauren Gawne, Kristine A. Hildebrandt, Casey Ford


We discuss the iconic properties of speech and gesture in a corpus of seven Tibet-Burman languages describing the 2015 Nepal earthquakes. We compare the onomatopoeia and gestures to that in a corpus from New Zealand to better understand how people who shared a dramatic multisensory event communicate that experience.