The impact of iconic gestures on foreign language word learning and its neural substrate

Abstract

Vocabulary acquisition represents a major challenge in foreign language learning. Research has demonstrated that gestures accompanying speech have an impact on memory for verbal information in the speakers' mother tongue and, as recently shown, also in foreign language learning. However, the neural basis of this effect remains unclear. In a within-subjects design, we compared learning of novel words coupled with iconic and meaningless gestures. Iconic gestures helped learners to significantly better retain the verbal material over time. After the training, participants' brain activity was registered by means of fMRI while performing a word recognition task. Brain activations to words learned with iconic and with meaningless gestures were contrasted. We found activity in the premotor cortices for words encoded with iconic gestures. In contrast, words encoded with meaningless gestures elicited a network associated with cognitive control. These findings suggest that memory performance for newly learned words is not driven by the motor component as such, but by the motor image that matches an underlying representation of the word's semantics.

Perception of co-speech gestures in aphasic patients: A visual exploration study during the observation of dyadic conversations

“…Cospeech gestures might activate a motor image that matches an underlying representation of the word's semantics (Macedonia, Mü ller, & Friederici, 2011). This in turn could lead to a deeper encoding because of multi-modal representation in memory (Feyereisen, 2006).…”

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

“…Focusing on two key elements of McNeill's theory-bi-directionality and obligatory integration-they presented evidence that gesture and speech mutually and automatically affect the semantic processing of one another during the comprehension process (for more on this relationship during comprehension, see Hostetter, 2011). This tight semantic relationship appears to extend beyond one's native language and apply to second languages (L2) and foreign languages (FL) as well (Gullberg;2006;Hardison, 2010;Kelly, McDevitt, & Esch, 2009;Macedonia, Müller, & Friederici, 2011;McCafferty & Stam, 2009;Quinn-Allen, 1995;Tellier, 2008). Focusing on FL comprehension, Kelly and colleagues (2009) showed that people learn and remember novel vocabulary items better when they are instructed with iconic hand gestures, and one neural mechanism responsible for this learning may be a strengthening of visual semantic representations.…”

A Bizarre Virtual Trainer Outperforms a Human Trainer in Foreign Language Word Learning

“…Firstly, enacting a word leaves a motor trace in one's memory [23]. This has been convincingly proven in neuroscientific experiments in which it is possible to detect activity in motor areas upon acoustic or visual word presentation [24,25]. Secondly, enhancement results from motor imagery [26,27]: it leads to deeper information processing [28] and has positive effects on memory.…”