Prominence in speech and gesture favour second language novel word learning

ABSTRACT

While recent research has shown that iconic gestures and the so-called pitch gestures (or gestures that mimic melody in speech) favour word learning in a second language, little is known about (a) the potential benefits of beat gestures (or hand gestures that accompany prosodic prominence) for second language novel word learning, and (b) the contribution of prosodic prominence (independently or in combination with gestural prominence) to this effect. This study investigates the effects of prosodic prominence (e.g. focal pitch accent) and visual prominence (e.g. beat gesture) on L2 novel vocabulary learning. In a within-subjects design, 96 Catalan-dominant native speakers were asked to learn 16 Russian words in four conditions, namely the presence or absence of prosodic prominence in speech (L+H* pitch accent) combined with the presence or absence of visual prominence (beat gesture). The results of recall and recognition tasks conducted after a training session showed that the strongest effect corresponded to target words presented with visual prominence together with prosodic prominence; by contrast, the condition involving visual prominence with no prosodic prominence triggered smaller effects than the condition involving prosodic prominence alone. Thus, beat gestures produced naturally (that is, accompanied by focal pitch accent in speech) favour second language vocabulary learning. The results have implications for second language instruction practices and multisensory integration and working memory models.

KEYWORDS:

• Beat gestures
• prosodic prominence
• pitch accent
• L2 word learning
• visual prominence

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the students at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra who participated in the experimental tasks as well as Discourse Completion Task recordings. Many thanks to Carmen Pérez Vidal and Joan Borràs-Comes, who allowed us to contact the students in their classes and external groups, and to Joan also for his help with the statistical analysis. We are grateful to Anna Denissenko for her assistance with the recording of stimuli. Finally, this research would not have been possible without funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation grant FFI2015-66533-P (“Intonational and gestural meaning in language”), and a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014SGR-925) to the Prosodic Studies Group.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In this article, the term ‘second language learning’ is used as a cover term that refers to the process of learning another language after the native or dominant one. This is a common strategy in the field, which uses this term to refer to the learning of a third or a fourth language (Gass, 2013).

2 The Discourse Completion Task is an inductive method which has been applied for many years in research on pragmatics and sociolinguistics, and also recently on prosody, with good results (e.g. Prieto & Roseano, 2010).

3 The decision to work with nouns was primarily due to the fact that this allowed us to have better control over the number of syllables, syllable types, and stress positions within the target Russian words.

4 Participants had to memorise 2 rows of 9 numbers shown briefly on a PowerPoint slide and then write them down on a sheet of paper.

Additional information

Funding

This research would not have been possible without funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation grant FFI2015-66533-P (“Intonational and gestural meaning in language”), and a grant awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya (2014SGR-925) to the Prosodic Studies Group. Agència de Gestió d\ 'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca.