If you鈥檙e learning a new language, making pronounced hand gestures could help you emphasise the correct parts of words.
In some languages, certain syllables within words are pronounced with markedly more weight than others, known as lexical stress. Previous research suggests that and now at New York University in Shanghai, China, and his colleagues have found that making hand movements also assists us in using lexical stress correctly.
Languages such as English commonly feature lexical stress. For example, the word 鈥渁ccent鈥� involves more emphasis on the first syllable, 鈥渁c鈥�, than the second, 鈥渃ent鈥�. Native speakers of Chinese dialects, however, don鈥檛 use lexical stress and may therefore find it particularly difficult to learn languages that feature it.
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To see if gestures could help, Tian and his team recruited 124 native Chinese speakers, aged between 18 and 28 years, most of whom watched videos of people performing up-and-down hand movements, synced to recordings of the same English words.
All of the words consisted of three syllables, with the lexical stress being equally distributed among the words to fall on either the first, middle or last syllables.
The participants were divided into four groups, three of which watched videos that featured gestures over every syllable of each word. In one group, a more pronounced gesture was carried out over the stressed syllable, with smaller gestures for the other two syllables.
The second group featured the pronounced gesture over a syllable that isn鈥檛 stressed, while the third had the same size gesture for each syllable. The fourth group saw videos that featured no gestures at all.
Before and after they watched the videos, the participants were asked to press a key when they thought lexical stress was being applied to different words.
Overall, any gesture helped the participants learn lexical stress, but when more pronounced gestures were matched to the stressed syllable, they were particularly good at identifying it.
鈥淚n general, gestures help to learn lexical stress, but how much help depends on the nature of gestures,鈥� says Tian.
The research involved several experiments, which makes it difficult to combine the results. Nevertheless, Tian estimates that the use of gestures helped the participants identify lexical stress between 10 and 15 per cent more accurately compared with no gestures at all.
Tian says this improvement is impressive considering that the participants were tasked with learning a 鈥渘ew language feature鈥� that they weren鈥檛 familiar with.
A follow-up study exposed the same Chinese speakers to Russian words, with gestures being similarly helpful for learning lexical stress.
鈥淥ur findings highlight the functional role of gestures in enhancing speech learning, suggesting practical implications for language teaching and learning,鈥� the authors write in their paper.
bioRxiv
