Embodying rhythmic properties of a foreign language through hand-clapping helps children to better pronounce words

Abstract

This study tested the effects of hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned French words on the pronunciation of these words by 7- to 8-year-old Catalan children. In a short training experiment with a pre- and posttest design, 28 children either repeated cognate words in French (e.g. French aspirateur, Catalan aspirador ‘vacuum cleaner’) while clapping to the rhythmic structure of those words or only repeated the words. Participants’ oral productions before and after training were rated for accentedness by three French native speakers. Results showed that in both groups, participants’ pronunciation improved after training, and crucially, children in the clapping group improved significantly more than those in the non-clapping group. Additionally, an acoustic analysis of the duration of word-final vowels indicated that only children in the clapping group significantly lengthened the final vowel after training, thus producing more target-like durational patterns. Our results suggest that a brief embodied intervention based on highlighting the rhythmic structure of words through hand-clapping has the potential to enhance pronunciation in a foreign language. The implications for second language teaching of pronunciation are discussed.

The effects of prosodic training with logatomes and prosodic gestures on L2 spontaneous speech

“…Finally, there is evidence that the mental representation of pitch is visuospatial in nature [12,13], indicating that making pitch directions and movements and durational patterns visible to the learners may help them process foreign language prosody. Recent studies have started to empirically test these embodied prosody teaching techniques and found a positive role of beat gestures [14, 15 16], hand-clapping [17,18,19], durational gestures [20], and pitch gestures [21] on the perception and pronunciation of L2 phonological features.…”