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OBSERVING AND PRODUCING DURATIONAL HAND GESTURES FACILITATES THE PRONUNCIATION OF NOVEL VOWEL-LENGTH CONTRASTS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 April 2020

Peng Li Open the ORCID record for Peng Li [Opens in a new window] ,
Florence Baills  and
Pilar Prieto
Peng Li*
Affiliation:
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Florence Baills
Affiliation:
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Pilar Prieto
Affiliation:
Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA) Universitat Pompeu Fabra
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Peng Li, Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Roc Boronat 138, 08018 Barcelona, Spain. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

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.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 42 , Issue 5 , December 2020 , pp. 1015 - 1039
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Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The authors sincerely thank Misa Fukukawa, Yosuke Nakano, and Ingrid Vilà-Giménez for their participation in creating the materials and Yuan Zhang for her assistance in conducting the experiment. Many thanks also to Lorraine Baqué, Joan Carles Mora, and Kazuya Saito for their comments and suggestions on the first draft of this article. Special thanks also go to the two anonymous reviewers and the editors, Susan Gass and Elizabeth Huntley, for invaluable comments and feedback.

This research was supported by funding from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (FFI2015-66533-P) and the Generalitat de Catalunya projects (2014 SGR-925 and 2017 SGR-971). The second author has a predoctoral research grant awarded by the Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

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