Using Gesture to Facilitate L2 Phoneme Acquisition: The Importance of Gesture and Phoneme Complexity

Abstract

Most language learners have difficulties acquiring the phonemes of a second language (L2). Unfortunately, they are often judged on their L2 pronunciation, and segmental inaccuracies contribute to miscommunication. Therefore, we aim to determine how to facilitate phoneme acquisition. Given the close relationship between speech and co-speech gesture, previous work unsurprisingly reports that gestures can benefit language acquisition, e.g., in (L2) word learning. However, gesture studies on L2 phoneme acquisition present contradictory results, implying that both specific properties of gestures and phonemes used in training, and their combination, may be relevant. We investigated the effect of phoneme and gesture complexity on L2 phoneme acquisition. In a production study, Dutch natives received instruction on the pronunciation of two Spanish phonemes, /u/ and /θ/. Both are typically difficult to produce for Dutch natives because their orthographic representation differs between both languages. Moreover, /θ/ is considered more complex than /u/, since the Dutch phoneme inventory contains /u/ but not /θ/. The instruction participants received contained Spanish examples presented either via audio-only, audio-visually without gesture, audio-visually with a simple, pointing gesture, or audio-visually with a more complex, iconic gesture representing the relevant speech articulator(s). Preceding and following training, participants read aloud Spanish sentences containing the target phonemes. In a perception study, Spanish natives rated the target words from the production study on accentedness and comprehensibility. Our results show that combining gesture and speech in L2 phoneme training can lead to significant improvement in L2 phoneme production, but both gesture and phoneme complexity affect successful learning: Significant learning only occurred for the less complex phoneme /u/ after seeing the more complex iconic gesture, whereas for the more complex phoneme /θ/, seeing the more complex gesture actually hindered acquisition. The perception results confirm the production findings and show that items containing /θ/ produced after receiving training with a less complex pointing gesture are considered less foreign-accented and more easily comprehensible as compared to the same items after audio-only training. This shows that gesture can facilitate task performance in L2 phonology acquisition, yet complexity affects whether certain gestures work better for certain phonemes than others.

Gesture–Speech Integration in Typical and Atypical Adolescent Readers

“…Moreover, gestures benefit comprehension of spoken narratives (Hough, 1990;Lyle, 2000;Schmithorst et al, 2006;Dargue and Sweller, 2020). Finally, there is growing evidence that gestures can enhance acquisition of novel L2 speech sounds (Morett and Chang, 2015;Zheng et al, 2018;Baills et al, 2019;Zhen et al, 2019;Hoetjes and Van Maastricht, 2020;Xi et al, 2020;Morett et al, 2022).…”

Gesture-speech coupling in L2 lexical stress production: A pre-registration of a speech acoustic and gesture kinematic study

“…Depending on the phoneme and gesture in question, perceiving gestures during L2 phoneme training can help in acquiring target-like L2 phoneme pronunciation (Hoetjes & Van Maastricht, 2020). Likewise, representational gestures can facilitate the L2 acquisition of vowel length production (Li et al, 2020), intonational contrasts (Kelly et al, 2017), and lexical tone perception (Morett & Chang, 2015).…”

“…One often proposed factor is the cognitive demand associated with the task. Several studies report that when cognitive demands are high, for instance because the L2 (supra)segment is challenging for learners or because they are less proficient in general, the benefit of gestures appears to decrease (Hoetjes & Van Maastricht, 2020;Kelly et al, 2014).…”

Can grammatical morphemes be taught? Evidence of gestures influencing second language procedural learning in middle childhood

“…Not unexpected, teachers naturally use gestures as a teaching tool in the classroom and previous studies suggest their value for L2 instruction. At the same time, research also shows that adding gesture does not automatically improve learning outcomes [18][19][20][21][22] leading researchers to call for more specific predictions about which gestures support learning and when these gestures will be helpful [23][24][25]. Related arguments from many areas of cognitive science have highlighted that it is important to examine the specific types of interaction between syntax and semantics and grounding that lead to understanding [26].…”