Beat gestures and prosodic prominence: impact on learning
Previous research has shown that gestures are beneficial for language learning. This doctoral thesis centers on the effects of beat gestures– i.e., hand and arm gestures that are typically associated with prosodically prominent positions in speech - on such processes. Little is known about how the t...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2018 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | CBUC, CESCA |
| Repositorio: | TDR. Tesis Doctorales en Red |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:www.tdx.cat:10803/463004 |
| Acceso en línea: | http://hdl.handle.net/10803/463004 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Prosodic prominence Gestural prominence Beat gestures 81 |
| Sumario: | Previous research has shown that gestures are beneficial for language learning. This doctoral thesis centers on the effects of beat gestures– i.e., hand and arm gestures that are typically associated with prosodically prominent positions in speech - on such processes. Little is known about how the two central properties of beat gestures, namely how they mark both information focus and rhythmic positions in speech, can be beneficial for learning either a first or a second language. The main goal of this PhD thesis is to investigate how prosodic and gestural prominence expressed together in beat gestures benefit (a) information memorization in one’s native language (Study 1); (b) vocabulary learning in a second language (Study 2); and (c) pronunciation improvement in a second language (Study 3). This dissertation includes three independent studies which all explore the above mentioned theme. The first study aims at investigating the role of prosodic prominence (pitch accents) and gesture prominence (beat gestures) on the recall of contrastive information in a piece of discourse. Results reveal that the presence of gestural prominence adds a further beneficial effect on information recall in comparison with the conditions where beat gestures are absent. The second study investigates the same phenomena and their effect this time (the stimuli contain the combination of the presence or absence of prosodic prominence in speech and the presence or absence of gestural prominence) on L2 novel words memorization. The results show that the strongest effect corresponds to target words presented with gestural prominence together with prosodic prominence. The third study aims to investigate also the same phenomenon, that is, whether the production of beat gestures on the part of the participants, as highlighters of rhythmic information, has additional beneficial effects on second language pronunciation improvement in comparison to only observing beat gestures. The results indicate that producing beat gestures leads to higher gains in accent improvement in comparison to only observing beat gestures. Overall, the three studies show evidence that beat gestures produced naturally (that is, accompanied by prosodic prominence) favor information memorization in one´s native language (Study 1) and novel words learning in a second language (Study 2). In addition to those findings, they also reveal that producing beat gestures is shown to have a beneficial effect for pronunciation improvement (Study 3). The findings of the studies presented in this thesis support the theories of embodied cognition with new evidence that adding visuospatial information expressed by beat gestures to prosodic prominence boosts learning. These results have implications for second language instruction practices and theories of embodied cognition. |
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