Effects of Hand Gestures on Auditory Learning of Second-Language Vowel Length Contrasts

Hirata, Yukari; Kelly, Spencer D.; Huang, Jessica; Manansala, Michael

doi:10.1044/2014_jslhr-s-14-0049

Cited by 38 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 40 publications

(47 reference statements)

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“…Hirata and Kelly (2010) investigated the potential effect of beats on learning a Japanese (nonnative) sound contrast and found that participants in the speech-gesture condition did not perceive the contrast any better than those in the speech-alone condition. Similar results were found by Hirata et al (2014) regarding the effect of beat gestures on segmental-level learning: participants who were trained using hand gestures did show improvement in identifying the target vowel length contrast, but the researchers pointed out that the highest gains were seen in the audio-mouth (no gesture) training condition in Hirata and Kelly (2010).…”

Section: The Role Of Gesturesupporting

confidence: 77%

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: The Role Of Gesturesupporting

confidence: 77%

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

Gluhareva

Prieto

2016

Language Teaching Research

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“…This make sense given research on native language processing showing that people rely on visual information more when they struggle to process auditory information (Sumby & Pollack, 1954; and specifically for hand gesture, Drijvers & Özyürek, 2016;Obermeier, Dolk, & Gunter, 2012). Although the present study cannot definitely determine whether the second or third account is correct, the results still make a novel contribution to the literature: In contrast to recent findings showing that metaphoric length gestures do not help with learning vowel length distinctions (Hirata & Kelly, 2010;Hirata et al, 2014), we have shown that metaphoric intonation (pitch) gestures do help non-native speakers process phonemic intonational information in FL speech (see also, Hannah et al, 2016). This finding is significant because it suggests that regardless of whether one type of FL speech contrast is inherently harder to process than the other, gesture plays different roles within each one, suggesting that some possible boundaries of gesture-speech integration at the phonemic level (more on this below).…”

Section: Intonational Contrastscontrasting

confidence: 55%

“…But for more unfamiliar distinctions, such as phonemic length contrasts, metaphoric gestures may not connect smoothly with FL speech, and in fact, may actually disrupt it. Together, these contrasting FL perception findings add texture to previous work showing that metaphoric gestures do not help with learning of FL length contrasts (Hirata & Kelly, 2010;Hirata et al, 2014;Kelly & Lee, 2012;Kelly et al, 2014). We are now one step closer to identifying what aspects of FL phoneme processing are more open to the influence of gesture and what aspects are more closed.…”

Section: Implications and Conclusionmentioning

confidence: 58%

Metaphoric Gestures Facilitate Perception of Intonation More than Length in Auditory Judgments of Non-Native Phonemic Contrasts

Kelly

Bailey

Hirata

2017

Collabra: Psychology

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It is well established that hand gestures affect comprehension and learning of semantic aspects of a foreign language (FL). However, much less is known about the role of hand gestures in lower-level language processes, such as perception of phonemes. To address this gap, we explored the role that metaphoric gestures play in perceiving FL speech sounds that varied on two dimensions: length and intonation. English speaking adults listened to Japanese length contrasts and sentence-final intonational distinctions in the context of congruent, incongruent and no gestures. For intonational contrasts, identification was more accurate for congruent gestures and less accurate for incongruent gestures relative to the baseline no gesture condition. However, for the length contrasts, there was no such clear and consistent pattern, and in fact, congruent gestures made speech processing more effortful. We conclude that metaphoric gestures help with some-but not all-novel speech sounds in a FL, suggesting that gesture and speech are phonemically integrated to differing extents depending on the nature of the gesture and/or speech sound.

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“…This might be surprising, considering the fact that a visual cue such as a written accent explicitly guides the learner as to which syllable is to be emphasised within the word. However, it does corroborate prior research which shows that the specific context in which L2 phonology acquisition does or does not occur matters when it comes to the facilitating role of gestures [12,15,28]. In addition, the use of cognates, while alleviating semantic processing load, does result in the use of less balanced item lists.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 81%

“…As accurate segment and prosody production contributes to L2 learners' intelligibility, comprehensibility and accentedness [9,10,11], research on the interplay between gestural and verbal input in this domain is especially relevant. However, regarding the benefits of gestures in the acquisition of L2 sounds, prior work presents contrasting results: Some studies find that gestures seen or produced during training facilitate the learning of both L2 segments and prosodic features [e.g., 12,13], others find no effect or report contexts in which gestures might even be unhelpful [14,15,16]. One possible reason for these contradicting results may be the type of gesture that is used during training.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Do gestures during training facilitate L2 lexical stress acquisition by Dutch learners of Spanish?

Maastricht¹,

Hoetjes²,

Drie³

2019

The 15th International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing

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The close relationship between speech and gesture has led to a range of studies focusing on the role of gesture in L1 and L2 language acquisition. However, few studies focused specifically on the acquisition of prosodic aspects of speech, and those that did, did not compare the possible effect of different types of gestures. Thus, this paper aims to determine whether seeing beat or metaphoric gestures during training facilitates L2 lexical stress acquisition as compared to seeing no gestures during training. Dutch participants received Spanish lexical stress training in one of three multimodal conditions and produced sentences containing cognates with diverging stress distribution in Dutch and Spanish before and afterwards. The results appear in line with our predictions in that learning proportions are higher after gestural training than after training without gestures and again higher after training with metaphoric gestures compared to training with beat gestures. However, a multinomial regression analysis reveals that only the presence vs. absence of a written accent in the cognate significantly affects L2 lexical stress acquisition. Hence, several factors are proposed that might explain our results and serve as a basis for future research.

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Effects of Hand Gestures on Auditory Learning of Second-Language Vowel Length Contrasts

Abstract: The overall effect of hand gesture on learning of segmental phonology is limited. Implications for theories of hand gesture are discussed in terms of the role it plays at different linguistic levels.

Cited by 38 publications

References 40 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

Metaphoric Gestures Facilitate Perception of Intonation More than Length in Auditory Judgments of Non-Native Phonemic Contrasts

Do gestures during training facilitate L2 lexical stress acquisition by Dutch learners of Spanish?

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