Cut-offs and co-occurring gestures: Similarities between speakers’ first and second languages

Abstract

This paper explores cut-offs in the oral narrations of Spanish native speakers in their mother tongue (L1), and in their language-under-study, English (L2). Fluency in the L2 varies with proficiency, and so cut-offs offer a possible means of evaluating this. However, there are certain aspects of fluency which might be common to the L1 and the L2, suggesting that the L1 and L2 share cognitive factors that lead to similar disfluency patterns. To determine if cut-offs are reliable markers of L2 fluency, independent of those occurring in the L1, we assessed the cut-off patterns in the L1 and L2 narrations of this group of speakers, following a multimodal approach. We observed similarities in both languages, potentially indicating that speakers use comparable cut-off-gesture patterns in the L1 and L2. We conclude that using speakers’ cut-offs in an L2 to gauge proficiency is meaningful only if the L1 cut-off behaviour is known.

The interplay between speech fluency and gesture in L1 Finnish and L2 English task-based interactions

“…However, these studies have often examined intermediate rather than advanced level learners. Furthermore, the more frequent use of gestures in the L2 is in line with some of the previous gesture studies ( [21,24,25]; but see [18]). Rather than being directly linked with L2 proficiency or resulting from a frequent use of compensatory gestures, the finding may be indicative of a more visible "expressive" trait in the L2.…”

“…Even though relatively few studies have tackled the relationship between fluency and gesture in L1 or L2 production, this topic is gaining more and more attention (read [16] for a full review) in different languages (e.g., English, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, German, and Turkish [17][18][19]). Notably, Graziano and Gullberg's [20] work on gesture and disfluency in oral narratives among different groups of speakers (L1 speakers, adult and child L2 learners in Dutch and Italian) revealed two major trends: (1) speakers rarely produce fluencemes during gestures, and (2) these co-occurring gestures can serve both referential and pragmatic functions.…”

“…Her findings corroborated Graziano and Gullberg's [20] results, which further addresses the need to explore this relationship in other comparative crosslinguistic investigations. Other studies have focused on the co-occurrence of gestures and specific fluencemes, such as repairs [19], cut-offs [18], and FPs [22], but without systematically comparing the types of fluencemes that may cooccur with gestures (but see [23] for a study with L1 speakers).…”

Proposing a revised functional classification of pragmatic gestures

“…The examples below have been taken from various corpora collected by the author since 2012 under a range of studies focusing on gestures (Lopez-Ozieblo 2016, 2019. The extracts presented here were selected to provide a cross-cultural, gender- Participants in all the studies were volunteers and students at various universities (in the UK, Spain and Hong Kong) and 20-25 years old.…”