Observing and Producing Pitch Gestures Facilitates the Learning of Mandarin Chinese Tones and Words

Abstract

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.

The Efficacy of Gesture on Second Language Pronunciation: An Exploratory Study of Handclapping as a Classroom Instructional Tool

“…Likewise, Morett and Chang (2015), with similar target stimuli and participants as in the Zheng et al. study, did not find a positive effect of metaphoric gestures on a tone identification test but did find a positive effect on a word‐meaning association test, further supporting the idea that gesture may be useful only for learning higher level features such as suprasegmental information and semantic properties (but see also Baills, Suárez‐González, González‐Fuente, & Prieto, 2019, for a potential positive effect even on tone identification).…”

Observing and Producing Durational Hand Gestures Facilitates the Pronunciation of Novel Vowel-Length Contrasts

“…A considerable body of research has demonstrated that the use of pitch gestures (e.g., hand gestures mimicking F0 contour) significantly improved the recall of words in tonal languages (Morett & Chang, 2015), as well as the perception (Hannah et al, 2016) and learning of L2 lexical tones (Baills et al, 2019). Morett and Chang (2015) taught 57 English-speakers 20 novel Mandarin words accompanied by (a) "pitch gestures" to show the pitch information, (b) "semantic gestures" to show the words' meaning, or (c) unaccompanied by gestures.…”

Emblem Gestures Improve Perception and Evaluation of Non-native Speech

“…For example, even beat gestures, which often have little inherent semantic connection to speech, affect L1 speech processing (Krahmer and Swerts, 2007;Biau and Soto-Faraco, 2013;Wang and Chu, 2013) and memory (So et al, 2012). And in an L2 context, there is evidence that viewing and producing a range of hand movements-beat gestures (Kushch et al, 2018), metaphoric pitch gestures representing lexical tone (Morett and Chang, 2015;Baills et al, 2019) and even iconic gestures with idiosyncratic meanings (Macedonia and Klimesch, 2014;Huang et al, 2019)-can help with L2 vocabulary learning and retention. Connecting these findings to the present study, it is interesting that the presence of any gesture increased memory for speech in Experiment 1 (both gesture conditions produced a ∼30% improvement in recall over speech alone) and decreased the number of "misheard" utterances in Experiment 2 (both gesture conditions reduced errors by over 60% compared to speech alone).…”

“…Many of the experiments on this topic have focused on how L2 learners attend to information conveyed through the hands when perceiving novel speech sounds ( Hannah et al, 2017 ; Kelly, 2017 ; Kushch et al, 2018 ; Baills et al, 2019 ; Hoetjes et al, 2019 ) and comprehending new vocabulary ( Allen, 1995 ; Sueyoshi and Hardison, 2005 ; Sime, 2006 ; Kelly et al, 2009 ; Morett, 2014 ; Morett and Chang, 2015 ; Baills et al, 2019 ; Huang et al, 2019 ). For example, Kelly et al (2009) investigated how semantic congruence of gesture and speech affected the learning of L2 Japanese vocabulary in native English speakers.…”