Speakers of many languages prefer allocentric frames of reference (FoRs) when talking about small-scale space, using words like "east" or "downhill." Ethnographic work has suggested that this preference is also reflected in how such speakers gesture. Here, we investigate this possibility with a field experiment in Juchitán,…

Natural languages make prolific use of conventional constituent-ordering patterns to indicate "who did what to whom," yet the mechanisms through which these regularities arise are not well understood. A series of recent experiments demonstrates that, when prompted to express meanings through silent gesture, people bypass native language…