Changes in Thinking for Speaking: A Longitudinal Case Study GALE STAM National Louis University Department of Psychology 5202 Old Orchard Road, Room 208 Skokie, IL 60077-4409 Email: gstam@nl.edu Cross-linguistic research on motion events has shown that Spanish speakers and English speakers have different patterns of thinking for speaking about motion, both linguistically and gesturally (for a review, see Stam, 2010b). Spanish speakers express path linguistically with verbs, and their path gestures tend to occur with path verbs, whereas English speakers express path linguistically with satellites (adverbs or particles), and their path gestures tend to occur with satellite units. This article investigated whether a Spanish-speaking English language learner’s thinking for speaking patterns about motion exhibited continuous linguistic and gestural change in her L1 (Spanish) and L2 (English). The results indicate that the learner’s gestural expression of path changed in both her L1 and L2, and her gestural expression of manner changed in her L2. This change suggests that manner, a pattern acquired in childhood, may not be resistant to change after all (Slobin, 1996; Stam, 2010b). The results have implications for the teaching of second and foreign languages. Keywords: motion events; thinking for speaking; L2 acquisition; speech; gesture MOTION IS AN INTEGRAL PART OF THE human experience. We move our bodies from one place to another, and we observe others moving. It is through movement and our senses that we explore the world during our first two years of life—the sensorimotor period, according to Piaget (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969)—and contin- ue to do so throughout our lifetime. This movement occurs in a sociocultural context (Vygotsky, 1978, 1986), where we are surrounded by the language of our culture. This language provides us with tools to organize our experience and to make sense of the world, and it provides us with a framework for expressing thoughts, feel- ings, events, and various semantic domains (Slobin, 1991). Much research in the past 20 years (see articles in this special issue for reviews) has focused on the semantic domain of motion events, typological language differences in how motion events are expressed, and how these typological differences influence how speakers of different languages think. This article investigates whether an English language learner’s thinking about motion lin- guistically and gesturally changed over a 14-year period of time in her first language (L1; Spanish) and her second language (L2; English) with increased L2 proficiency and use. BACKGROUND Spontaneous (Co-speech) Gestures The gestures referred to in this article are spontaneous movements of the hands that people make while they are speaking. They are not culturally specific (emblems) or lexicalized ges- tures, such as the thumbs-up sign, whose meaning is well known to all members of a cultural group, or gestures that complete an utterance by filling a grammatical slot and produce a mixed syntax (Slama–Cazacu, 1976). Co-speech gestures are phonologically, semantically, and pragmatically synchronic with speech and tend to occur with The Modern Language Journal, 99, Supplement, (2015) DOI: 10.1111/modl.12180 0026-7902/15/83–99 $1.50/0 © 2015 The Modern Language Journal