The impact of beat gestures on L2 acquisition

The impact of beat gestures on L2 acquisition

Olga Kushch1, Daria Gluhareva1, Alfonso Igualada1, Pilar Prieto1,2

1. Universiat Pompeu Fabra

2. ICREA

Beat gestures are rhythmic hand and arm movements that are typically associated with prominent prosodic positions in speech. Little is known about their potential beneficial effects (in addition to the effects of prosodic prominence) on L2 learning.
The present study consists of three experiments. Experiment 1 investigates the effects of prosodic prominence (L+H* pitch accent) and visual prominence (beat gestures) on L2 novel vocabulary acquisition. Foreign words were presented under 4 experimental conditions: prominence in: 1) neither speech nor gesture, 2) both speech and gesture, 3) speech but not in gesture, 4) gesture but not in speech. The results showed a positive effect of prosodic and gestural prominence working together on L2 word memorization.
Experiments 2 and 3 investigate the effect of beat gesture observation and production on pronunciation improvement in a language with different rhythmic properties than one’s own. The results show that beat gesture observation and production improve learners’ accentedness.
The results of these three experiments demonstrate that beat gestures act as highlighters of prosodic information and represent a useful supportive strategy for foreign language acquisition. Our results are in line with embodied cognition perspectives (e.g. Hu et al., 2015).