TY - JOUR
T1 - Emphasising sound and meaning
T2 - pitch gestures enhance Mandarin lexical tone acquisition
AU - Morett, Laura M.
AU - Chang, Li Yun
N1 - Funding Information:
This research was supported by a Federico and Rena Perlino Research Award and a Chancellor’s Fellowship from the University of California, Santa Cruz to L.M.M. and a Fulbright Foreign Scholarship from the Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to L.-Y.C. Portions of the results were presented at the twenty-first Second Language Research Forum (2012, October). We thank Kai Hwang for helping with the creation of audio test stimuli. Additionally, we thank Brian C. Becker and Adeetee Bhide, as well as our anonymous reviewers, for helpful feedback on this manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 Taylor & Francis.
PY - 2015/3/16
Y1 - 2015/3/16
N2 - Lexical tones – pitches differentiating between word meanings in tonal languages – are particularly difficult for atonal language speakers to learn. To test the hypotheses of embodied cognition and spoken word recognition, we examined whether – and how – gesture could facilitate English speakers' discrimination between Mandarin words differing in lexical tone. Words were learned with gestures conveying tone pitch contours (pitch gestures), gestures conveying word meanings (semantic gestures) or no gestures. The results demonstrated that pitch gestures enhanced English speakers' discrimination between the meanings of Mandarin words differing in tone, whereas semantic gestures hindered their identification of tones in learned words. These findings indicate that the visuospatial features of pitch gestures strengthen the relationship between English speakers' representations of Mandarin lexical tones and word meanings, supporting the predictions of spoken word recognition and embodied cognition.
AB - Lexical tones – pitches differentiating between word meanings in tonal languages – are particularly difficult for atonal language speakers to learn. To test the hypotheses of embodied cognition and spoken word recognition, we examined whether – and how – gesture could facilitate English speakers' discrimination between Mandarin words differing in lexical tone. Words were learned with gestures conveying tone pitch contours (pitch gestures), gestures conveying word meanings (semantic gestures) or no gestures. The results demonstrated that pitch gestures enhanced English speakers' discrimination between the meanings of Mandarin words differing in tone, whereas semantic gestures hindered their identification of tones in learned words. These findings indicate that the visuospatial features of pitch gestures strengthen the relationship between English speakers' representations of Mandarin lexical tones and word meanings, supporting the predictions of spoken word recognition and embodied cognition.
KW - embodied cognition
KW - gesture
KW - lexical tone
KW - second language acquisition
KW - spoken word recognition
KW - word learning
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U2 - 10.1080/23273798.2014.923105
DO - 10.1080/23273798.2014.923105
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84938391145
SN - 2327-3798
VL - 30
SP - 347
EP - 353
JO - Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
JF - Language, Cognition and Neuroscience
IS - 3
ER -