Beat gestures modulate auditory integration in speech perception

Biau, Emmanuel; Soto‐Faraco, Salvador

doi:10.1016/j.bandl.2012.10.008

Cited by 76 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 26 publications

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“…While the role of beat gestures in improving overall pronunciation and suprasegmentals in L2 learners has been underexplored, the result of the present study is in line with the previous literature on the relationship between gesture and prosody in one's first language (see, amongst others, Biau and Soto-Faraco, 2013;Krahmer and Swerts, 2007). In the present study, while both conditions involved rhythm training, training with beat gestures resulted in significantly better outcomes for difficult items than no-beat (speech only) training.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

“…Biau and Soto-Faraco (2013) found that beat gestures play a significant role in helping the listener regulate the parsing of a stream of speech, as well as focus his or her attention on the most relevant aspects of the information being conveyed. Further highlighting the role of beat gestures in native language processing, Krahmer and Swerts (2007) found that seeing a manual beat gesture on a word resulted in increased prominence perception of that word.…”

Section: The Role Of Gesturementioning

confidence: 99%

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Training with rhythmic beat gestures benefits L2 pronunciation in discourse-demanding situations

Gluhareva

Prieto

2016

Language Teaching Research

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Recent research has shown that beat gestures (hand gestures that co-occur with speech in spontaneous discourse) are temporally integrated with prosodic prominence and that they help word memorization and discourse comprehension. However, little is known about the potential beneficial effects of beat gestures in second language (L2) pronunciation learning. This study investigates the impact of beat gesture observation on the acquisition of native-like speech patterns in English by examining the effect of a brief training with or without beat gestures on participants' ratings of accentedness. In a within-participants, pre-/post-test design, participants (undergraduate students learning English as a foreign language) watched a training video in which an L2 instructor gave spontaneous responses to discourse prompts. The prompts belonged to one of two categories (easy and difficult), and were presented by the instructor either with or without accompanying beat gestures. Participants' own answers to the prompts were recorded before and after training and evaluated by five native speaker judges. The results of the comparison between the participants' pre-training and post-training speech samples demonstrated that beat gesture training significantly improved the participants' accentedness ratings on the set of difficult (more discourse-demanding) items. The results of the study support the role of beat gestures as highlighters of rhythmic information and have implications for pronunciation instruction practices.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Section: The Role Of Gesturementioning

confidence: 99%

Training with rhythmic beat gestures benefits L2 pronunciation in discourse-demanding situations

Gluhareva

Prieto

2016

Language Teaching Research

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“…Indeed, there is growing research on the role of observing and producing hand gestures in language processing and learning (Kelly et al, 2008; Goldin-Meadow, 2014). For example, beat gestures (quick flicks of the hand emphasizing certain words) can change how listeners perceive words (Krahmer and Swerts, 2007; Biau and Soto-Faraco, 2013), and this change in perception is caused by increased activity in auditory brain regions (Hubbard et al, 2008). Moreover, in the context of L2 learning, observing (Kelly et al, 2009) and producing (Macedonia et al, 2011) iconic hand gestures helps to learn and remember new vocabulary in a foreign language.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although most of the research on the integration of gesture and speech focuses on higher levels of analysis (e.g., semantic and pragmatic), there is evidence that the two modalities may also be integrated at lower phonological levels as well (Gentilucci, 2003; Bernardis and Gentilucci, 2006; Krahmer and Swerts, 2007; Hubbard et al, 2008; Biau and Soto-Faraco, 2013). For example, Krahmer and Swerts (2007) showed that, when people produced particular words with beat gestures (which convey rhythmic and prosodic information) in a sentence, they produced those specific words with increased duration and increased pitch height.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the role of hand gestures in learning novel phoneme contrasts and vocabulary in a second language

et al. 2014

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Co-speech hand gestures are a type of multimodal input that has received relatively little attention in the context of second language learning. The present study explored the role that observing and producing different types of gestures plays in learning novel speech sounds and word meanings in an L2. Naïve English-speakers were taught two components of Japanese—novel phonemic vowel length contrasts and vocabulary items comprised of those contrasts—in one of four different gesture conditions: Syllable Observe, Syllable Produce, Mora Observe, and Mora Produce. Half of the gestures conveyed intuitive information about syllable structure, and the other half, unintuitive information about Japanese mora structure. Within each Syllable and Mora condition, half of the participants only observed the gestures that accompanied speech during training, and the other half also produced the gestures that they observed along with the speech. The main finding was that participants across all four conditions had similar outcomes in two different types of auditory identification tasks and a vocabulary test. The results suggest that hand gestures may not be well suited for learning novel phonetic distinctions at the syllable level within a word, and thus, gesture-speech integration may break down at the lowest levels of language processing and learning.

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“…For the experiment with the prosodic cues, following Fodor's (2002) theory and the results in Biau and Soto-Faraco (2013) and Jun (2003), the prediction is that the pause between NPs would make all speakers prefer low attachment, regardless of their silent reading preference, while the absence of a pause will show the same preferences as the silent reading for each of the groups.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Prosodic Cues in Relative Clauses Disambiguation: Bilinguals vs. L2 Learners

Checa-García

2016

J. New Approaches Educ. Res.

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This study investigates the preferences for attachment of a relative clause (RC) to a complex noun phrase (NP) of the type: NP1 of NP2, in Spanish-English bilinguals and advanced learners of Spanish. Spanish speakers show a moderate preference for attaching the RC to the first NP, while speakers of English prefer the second NP. Subjects were presented this construction in written (Experiment 1) and oral (Experiment 2) forms. Results show no group had a preference for either attachment in silent reading, Low Attachment was preferred with a pause after NP1 by learners, and High Attachment was preferred in the absence of any pause by bilinguals and learners. However, the learner group behaved distinctively in Experiment 2 in two ways: their reaction times were shorter, and their choice for the kind of RC attachment was more sensitive to the absence of a pause being more likely to choose Low Attachment, as English monolinguals. These results suggest that advanced learners are influenced by their L1 more heavily in oral comprehension than in reading, while bilinguals take longer for processing prosodic cues. Reasons for a slower bilingual processing are posited. Lastly, implications for prosody teaching are drawn from these results.

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Beat gestures modulate auditory integration in speech perception

Cited by 76 publications

References 26 publications

Training with rhythmic beat gestures benefits L2 pronunciation in discourse-demanding situations

Training with rhythmic beat gestures benefits L2 pronunciation in discourse-demanding situations

Exploring the role of hand gestures in learning novel phoneme contrasts and vocabulary in a second language

Prosodic Cues in Relative Clauses Disambiguation: Bilinguals vs. L2 Learners

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