OBSERVING AND PRODUCING PITCH GESTURES FACILITATES THE LEARNING OF MANDARIN CHINESE TONES AND WORDS
Open accessAbstract
This study investigates the perception and production of a specific type of metaphoric gesture that mimics melody in speech, also called pitch gesture, in the learning of L2 suprasegmental features. In a between-subjects design, a total of 106 participants with no previous knowledge of Chinese were asked to observe (Experiment 1) and produce (Experiment 2) pitch gestures during a short multimodal training session on Chinese tones and words. In both experiments they were tested on (a) tone identification and (b) word learning. Results showed the positive effect of a training session with pitch gesture observation compared to a training session without it (Experiment 1) and the benefits of producing gestures compared to only observing them and repeating the words aloud (Experiment 2). A comparison of the results of the two experiments revealed that there was no significant difference between the simple observation of pitch gestures and the production of speech accompanied by pitch gestures in facilitating lexical tone identification and word learning. Thus, both perception and production tasks with pitch gestures can be regarded as beneficial learning strategies for the initial stages of tones acquisition in the Chinese as a Second Language classroom.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
There is much research providing empirical support for the role of gestures in L2 learning for aspects such as speech comprehension, word memorization and pronunciation.
“There is much research providing empirical support for the role of gestures in L2 learning for aspects such as speech comprehension [9,10], word memorization [11,12] and pronunciation [13–17].”
From Can grammatical morphemes be taught? Evidence of gestures influencing second language procedural learning in middle childhood (2023) · cites this paper as [12]
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cites
Barsalou, L. W. (2008) · Annual Review of Psychology · doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.59.103006.093639 · Cited by 5,936 · cited 2× · see citing works
“Much research on this domain, especially in neuroscience, has shown brain activation of motor and perception networks when participants were engaged in different tasks involving abilities such as memory, knowledge, language, or thought (see Barsalou, 2008, for a review).”
BackgroundThe effect of gestures on second language memorisation by young children
Tellier, M. (2008) · Gesture · doi:10.1075/gest.8.2.06tel · Cited by 257 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Research works printed but not linked: 43
- Austin, E. E., & Sweller, N. (2014). Presentation and production: The role of gesture in spatial communication. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 122, 92-103.
- Borghi, A. M., & Caruana, F. (2015). Embodiment theory. In J. D. Wright (Ed.), International encyclopedia of the social and behavioral sciences (2nd ed., pp. 420-426). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier.
- Bunting, M., Cowan, N., & Saults, J. S. (2006). How does running memory span work? Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 59, 1691-1700.
- Burnham, D., Ciocca, V., & Stokes, S. (2001). Auditory-visual perception of lexical tone. In P. Dalsgaard, B. Lindberg, H. Benner, & Z.-H. Tan (Eds.), Proceedings from Eurospeech 2001: 7th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (pp. 395-398). Aalborg, Denmark: Center for Personkommunikation.
- Casasanto, D., Phillips, W., & Boroditsky, L. (2003). Do we think about music in terms of space? Metaphoric representation of musical pitch. Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science, 10, 1323.
- Cassidy, J. W. (1993). Effects of various sightsinging strategies on non-music majors' pitch accuracy. Journal of Research in Music Education, 41, 293-302.
- Chao, Y. R. (1968). A grammar of spoken Chinese. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
- Chen, C. M. (2013). Gestures as tone markers in multilingual communication. In I. Kecskes (Ed.), Research in Chinese as a second language (pp. 143-168). Boston, MA, and Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter Mouton.
- Chen, T. H., & Massaro, D. W. (2008). Seeing pitch: Visual information for lexical tones of Mandarin-Chinese. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 123, 2356-2366.
- Cohen, R. L. (1981). On the generality of some memory laws. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 22, 267-281.
- Francis, A. L., Ciocca, V., Ma, L., & Fenn, K. (2008). Perceptual learning of Cantonese lexical tones by tone and non-tone language speakers. Journal of Phonetics, 36, 268-294.
- Goldin-Meadow, S. (2003). Hearing gesture: How our hands help us think. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
- Goldin-Meadow, S. (2011). Learning through gesture. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 2, 595-607.
- Goldin-Meadow, S. (2014). Widening the lens: What the manual modality reveals about language, learning and cognition. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 369, 1-11.
- Goldin-Meadow, S., Cook, S. W., & Mitchell, Z. A. (2009). Gesturing gives children new ideas about math. Psychological Science: A Journal of the American Psychological Society, 20, 267-272.
- Goldin-Meadow, S., Nusbaum, H., Kelly, S. D., & Wagner, S. (2001). Explaining math: Gesturing lightens the load. Psychological Science: A Journal of the American Psychological Society, 12, 516-522.
- González-Fuente, S., Escandell-Vidal, V., & Prieto, P. (2015). Gestural codas pave the way to the under- standing of verbal irony. Journal of Pragmatics, 90, 26-47.
- Gullberg, M. (1998). Gesture as a communication strategy in second language discourse: A study of learners of French and Swedish. Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press.
- Gullberg, M. (2006). Some reasons for studying gesture and second language acquisition (Homage to Adam Kendon). IRAL-International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 44, 103-124.
- Gullberg, M. (2014). Gestures and second language acquisition. In C. Müller, A. Cienki, E. Fricke, S. Ladewig, D. McNeill, & S. Tessendorf (Eds.), Body, language, communication: An international handbook on multi- modality in human interaction (Vol. 2, pp. 1868-1875). Berlin, Germany, and Boston, MA: Mouton De Gruyter.
- Hao, Y. C. (2012). Second language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese tones by tonal and nontonal language speakers. Journal of Phonetics, 40, 269-279.
- Hannah, B., Wang, Y., Jongman, A., & Sereno, J. A. (2016). Cross-modal association between auditory and visual-spatial information in Mandarin tone perception. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 140, 3225.
- Hirata, Y., & Kelly, S. D. (2010). Effects of lips and hands on auditory learning of second-language speech sounds. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 53, 298-310.
- Hirata, Y., Kelly, S. D., Huang, J., & Manansala, M. (2014). Effects of hand gestures on auditory learning of second-language vowel length contrasts. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 57, 2090-2101.
- Igualada, A., Esteve-Gibert, N., & Prieto, P. (2017). Beat gestures improve word recall in 3-to 5-year-old children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 156, 99-112.
- Kendon, A. (2004). Gesture: Visible action as utterance. New York, NY: New York University Press.
- Krauss, R. M., Chen, Y., Gottesman, R. F., & McNeill, D. (2000). Lexical gestures and lexical access: A process model. In D. McNeill (Ed.), Language and gesture (pp. 261-283). New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Kushch, O., & Prieto, P. (2016). The effects of pitch accentuation and beat gestures on information recall in contrastive discourse. In J. Barnes, A. Brugos, S. Shattuck-Hufnagel, & N. Veilleux (Eds.), Proceedings of speech prosody 8 (pp. 922-925). Boston: ICSA.
- Kushch, O., Igualada, A., & Prieto, P. (2018). Prominence in speech and gesture favor second language novel word learning. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. Available at https://doi.org/10.1080/ 23273798.2018.1435894. · DOI · Paper page
- McCafferty, S. G. (2002). Gesture and creating zones of proximal development for second language learning. Modern Language Journal, 86, 192-203.
- McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and mind: What gestures reveal about thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
- McNeill, D. (2005). Gesture and thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
- Paivio, A. (1990). Mental representations: A dual coding approach. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- Saltz, E., & Donnenwerth-Nolan, S. (1981). Does motoric imagery facilitate memory for sentences? A selective interference test. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 20, 322-332.
- Smith, D., & Burnham, D. (2012). Facilitation of Mandarin tone perception by visual speech in clear and degraded audio: Implications for cochlear implants. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 131, 1480-1489.
- Stefan, K., Cohen, L. G., Duque, J., Mazzocchio, R., Celnik, P., Sawaki, L., et al. (2005). Formation of a motor memory by action observation. The Journal of Neuroscience: The Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 25, 9339-9346.
- Szumilas, M. (2010). Explaining odd ratios. Journal of the Canadian Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 19, 227-229.
- Wagner, S. M., Nusbaum, H., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2004). Probing the mental representation of gesture: Is hand waving spatial? Journal of Memory and Language, 50, 395-407.
- Wang, Y., Behne, D. M., & Jiang, H. (2008). Linguistic experience and audio-visual perception of non-native fricatives. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 124, 1716-1726.
- Wang, Y., Jongman, A., & Sereno, J. A. (2003a). Acoustic and perceptual evaluation of Mandarin tone productions before and after perceptual training. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 113, 1033-1043.
- Wang, Y., Spence, M. M., Jongman, A., & Sereno, J. A. (1999). Training American listeners to perceive Mandarin tones. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 106, 3649-3658.
- Xu, Y. (1994). Production and perception of coarticulated tones. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 95, 2240-2253.
- Yuan, C., González-Fuente, S., Baills, F., & Prieto, P. (2018, in press). Observing pitch gestures favors the learning of Spanish intonation by Mandarin speakers. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1-28. Available at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263117000316. · DOI · Paper page
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Janzen Ulbricht, N. (2023) · PLOS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0280543 · Cited by 3 · see citing works
- Authors
- Baills, F., Suárez-González, N., González-Fuente, S., & Prieto, P.
- Affiliations
- Universitat Pompeu Fabra (ES)
- Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ES)
- Corresponding author
- Baills, Florence
- Venue
- Studies in Second Language Acquisition
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2018-06-21
- Volume
- 41
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 33-58
- ISSN
- 0272-2631 (ISSN-L)
- 1470-1545
- OpenAlex
- W2809093921
- Cited by
- 74
- References
- 2
- Citations by year
- 2026: 13 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 7 · 2019: 1 · 2018: 1
- FWCI
- 5.57
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Studies in Second Language Acquisition (publishedVersion)
- Repositori digital de la UPF (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Universitat Pompeu Fabra
- Generalitat de Catalunya (SGR 925, 2014SGR)
- Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (FFI2015-66533-P)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Phonetics and Phonology Research
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Language and Linguistics › EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Second Language Acquisition and Learning
- Keywords
- Mandarin tones, tone recognition, word learning, second language acquisition, gesture production, prosodic features, multimodal training, Chinese as a second language
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
