Embodied pronunciation training: the benefits of visuospatial hand gestures
- Autores: Peng Li
- Directores de la Tesis: Pilar Prieto Vives (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Pompeu Fabra ( España ) en 2021
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Yukari Hirata (presid.), Fabián Santiago Vargas (secret.), Marieke Hoetjes (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Traducción y Ciencias del Lenguaje por la Universidad Pompeu Fabra
- Calificación: Sobresaliente Cum Laude
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
- Resumen
In the last few decades, the use of hand gestures that encode phonological features of the target language has been proven to play a positive role in L2 suprasegmental learning. However, less is known about the effects of embodied pronunciation training on the acquisition of novel segments. This doctoral dissertation includes three between-subject studies which tested the effects of visuospatial hand movements as pedagogical gestures for training L2 pronunciation features.
Study 1 investigates the potential benefits of horizontal hand sweep gestures encoding durational features for boosting the perception and production of non-native vowel-length contrasts. In a between-subjects experiment with a pretest–posttest design, 50 Catalan participants without any knowledge of Japanese practiced perceiving and producing minimal pairs of Japanese disyllabic words featuring vowel-length contrasts in one of two conditions, namely with gestures or without them. Pretest and posttest consisted of the completion of identical vowel-length identification and imitation tasks. The results showed that while participants improved equally at posttest across the two conditions in the identification task, the Gesture group obtained a larger improvement than the No Gesture group in the imitation task. These results corroborate the claim that producing hand gestures encoding prosodic properties of speech may help naïve learners to learn novel phonological contrasts in a foreign language.
Study 2 investigates the impact of embodied training of pronunciation with visuospatial hand gestures cueing Mandarin aspirated plosives. Sixty-seven Catalan participants learned to pronounce and memorized novel Mandarin words containing non-native aspirated plosives with or without performing hand gestures. They were tested on perception, production, and word-meaning recognition in a pretest, an immediate, and a delayed posttest. Results show that participants who appropriately performed hand gestures gained enhanced voice onset time (VOT) values of the aspirated plosives and yielded a continuous improvement in the overall pronunciation of the target words. Furthermore, gestural training helped maintain word recognition accuracy after three days, while non-gestural training did not. These results suggest that appropriate gesture performance during training is crucial in maintaining the effects of L2 pronunciation training.
Finally, study 3 explores the effects of embodied prosodic training of L2 utterances on the production of non-native French front rounded vowels (i.e., /y, ø, œ/) and overall pronunciation. Fifty-seven Catalan learners of French practiced pronunciation in one of two conditions: one group observed visuospatial hand gestures embodying prosodic features of the sentences that they were listening to, while the other group did not see any such gestures. The learning outcome was assessed in a pretest, posttest, and delayed posttest through a dialogue-reading task and a sentence imitation task in terms of accentedness, comprehensibility, and fluency scores, and through formant analysis of participant-produced target vowels. The results showed that compared to non-embodied training, embodied prosodic training yielded continuous improvement in accentedness in both tasks and improved the F2 values of French front rounded vowels (more fronted). As for comprehensibility and fluency scores, both groups showed similar levels of significant improvement. This study highlights the interaction between prosodic and segmental features of speech by showing that training with embodied suprasegmental features has a direct beneficial effect on accentedness and the phonological acquisition of specific vocalic features.
Overall, the three studies show the benefits of embodied pronunciation training involving hand gestures that encode segmental and suprasegmental phonological information. These results highlight the need to integrate embodied training methods in L2 classrooms and support the predictions of the Embodied Cognition paradigm for L2 phonological learning.
Publications related to the thesis Li, P., Xi, X., Baills, F. & Prieto, P. (2021, in press). Training non-native aspirated plosives with hand gestures: Learners' gesture performance matters. Language Cognition and Neuroscience.10.1080/23273798.2021.1937663 Li, P., Baills, F. & Prieto, P. (2020). Observing and producing durational hand gestures facilitates the pronunciation of novel vowel-length contrasts. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 42(5): 1015 - 1039. 10.1017/S0272263120000054.
Xi, X., Li, P., Baills, F. & Prieto, P. (2020). Hand gestures facilitate the acquisition of novel phonemic contrasts when appropriately mimic target phonetic features. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 63(11):3571-3585. https://doi.org/10.1044/2020_JSLHR-20-00084.
Li, P., Xi, X., & Baills, F., Prieto, P. (2020). Appropriately performing hand gestures cueing phonetic features facilitates simultaneous speech imitation in an L2. In Proceedings of the 7th GeSpIn Conference, GeSpIN 2020, 7-9 September 2020. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.
Xi, X., Li, P., Baills, F., & Prieto, P. (2020). Training the pronunciation of L2 novel phonetic features: A comparison of observing versus producing hand gestures. In Proceedings of the 7th GeSpIn Conference, GeSpIN 2020, 7-9 September 2020. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.
Li, P., Baills, F., Baqué, L., & Prieto, P. (under review). Embodied prosodic training helps improve not only accentedness but also vowel accuracy. Language Teaching Research.
Ozakin, A., Xi, X., Li, P., & Prieto, P. (under review). Thanks or tanks: Training with tactile cues facilitates the pronunciation of non-native English interdental consonants. Language, Learning and Development.
Xi. X., Li, P., Baills, F., & Prieto, P. (in prep.). Appropriate gesture performance helps the learning of novel segmental features more than observing gestures.
