This study investigates the perception and production of a specific type of metaphoric gesture that mimics melody in speech, also called pitch gesture, in the learning of L2 suprasegmental features. In a between-subjects design, a total of 106 participants with no previous knowledge of Chinese were asked to observe (Experiment 1) and produce (Experiment 2) pitch gestures during a short multimodal training session on Chinese tones and words. In both experiments they were tested on (a) tone identification and (b) word learning. Results showed the positive effect of a training session with pitch gesture observation compared to a training session without it (Experiment 1) and the benefits of producing gestures compared to only observing them and repeating the words aloud (Experiment 2). A comparison of the results of the two experiments revealed that there was no significant difference between the simple observation of pitch gestures and the production of speech accompanied by pitch gestures in facilitating lexical tone identification and word learning. Thus, both perception and production tasks with pitch gestures can be regarded as beneficial learning strategies for the initial stages of tones acquisition in the Chinese as a Second Language classroom.

Recent studies on the learning of L2 prosody have suggested that pitch gestures can enhance the learning of the L2 lexical tones. Yet it remains unclear whether the use of these gestures can aid the learning of L2 intonation, especially by tonal-language speakers. Sixty-four Mandarin speakers with basic-level Spanish were asked to learn three Spanish intonation patterns, all involving a low tone on the nuclear accent. In a pre-post test experimental design, half of the participants received intonation training without the use of pitch gestures (the control group) while the other half received the same training but with pitch gestures representing nuclear intonation contours (the experimental group). Musical (melody, pitch) abilities were also measured. The results revealed that (a) the experimental group significantly improved intonational production outcomes, and (b) even though participants with stronger musical abilities performed better, those with weaker musical abilities benefited more from observing pitch gestures.

Though research has shown that rhythmic training is beneficial for phonological speech processing, little empirical work has been carried out to assess whether rhythmic training in the classroom can help to improve pronunciation in a second language. This study tests the potential benefits of hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned French words for the acquisition of pronunciation patterns by Chinese adolescents. In a between-subjects training experiment with a pretest/posttest design, 50 Chinese adolescents either repeated new French words while clapping out their rhythmic structure (clapping condition) or only repeated the words (non-clapping condition). Participants’ oral production before and after training was (1) perceptually rated for accentedness by two French native speakers and (2) acoustically analysed for final syllable duration. While the results showed an only near-significant improvement from pretest to posttest in accentedness ratings for the clapping group, a significant improvement was obtained for acoustic durational measures. Individual musical abilities did not interact significantly in either of the two analyses, and working memory interacted significantly only with accentedness. These results show that a short training session in which clapping is used to highlight the prosodic structure of words can help improve pronunciation in a foreign language.

While empirical studies have shown the beneficial role of observing and producing hand gestures mimicking pitch features in the learning of L2 tonal or intonational contrasts, mixed results have been obtained for the use of gestures encoding durational contrasts at the perceptual level. This study investigates the potential benefits of horizontal hand-sweep gestures encoding durational features for boosting the perception and production of nonnative vowel-length contrasts. In a between-subjects experiment with a pretest–posttest design, 50 Catalan participants without any knowledge of Japanese practiced perceiving and producing minimal pairs of Japanese disyllabic words featuring vowel-length contrasts in one of two conditions, namely with gestures or without them. Pretest and posttest consisted of the completion of identical vowel-length identification and imitation tasks. The results showed that while participants improved equally at posttest across the two conditions in the identification task, the Gesture group obtained a larger improvement than the No Gesture group in the imitation task. These results corroborate the claim that producing hand gestures encoding prosodic properties of speech may help naïve learners to learn novel phonological contrasts in a foreign language.

The present study explored whether listening to songs and singing can improve second language pronunciation and vocabulary learning at beginning stages of language acquisition. One hundred and eight Chinese students underwent a 4-min training session to learn 14 words from a meaningful French song about the parts of the body in either one of two conditions: in Experiment 1, listening to rhythmic speech vs listening to the same words but in a song (50 participants), and in Experiment 2, listening to vs singing a song (58 participants). Accentedness ratings of pretest and posttest recordings revealed that (a) the song listening group reduced accentedness significantly more than the rhythmic speech listening group (Experiment 1); and (b) singing and listening to a song yielded similar significant improvements after training (Experiment 2).