For example, when describing a scene where Sylvester swings on a rope, the English speakers used gestures showing an arc trajectory, and the Japanese and Turkish speakers tended to use straight gestures showing the motion but not the arc.

Dr Kita suggests this is because Japanese and Turkish have no verb that corresponds to the English intransitive verb “to swing.”

While English speakers use the arc gesture because their language can readily express the change of location and the arc-shaped trajectory, Japanese and Turkish speakers cannot as easily express the concept of movement with an arc trajectory, so they use the straight gesture.

Dr Kita said: “My research suggests that speakers of different languages generate different spatial images of the same event in a way that matches the expressive possibilities of their particular language. In other words, language influences spatial thinking at the moment of speaking.”