Focusing on FL comprehension, Kelly and colleagues ( 2009) showed that people learn and remember novel vocabulary items better when they are instructed with iconic hand gestures, and one neural mechanism responsible for this learning may be a strengthening of visual semantic representations. This tight semantic relationship appears to extend beyond one’s native language and apply to second languages (L2) and foreign languages (FL) as well ( Gullberg 2006 Hardison, 2010 Kelly, McDevitt, & Esch, 2009 Macedonia, Müller, & Friederici, 2011 McCafferty & Stam, 2009 Quinn-Allen, 1995 Tellier, 2008). Note how these two iconic gestures combine with speech to create two different pictures of your friend’s topsy-turvy ride. Now imagine she said this while making either several horizontal tight corkscrew gestures vs. For example, suppose a friend describes riding on a roller coaster by saying, “. Iconic gestures-which visually represent object attributes, motions or spatial relationships-are particularly well suited to adding semantic richness to speech. McNeill’s prominent “integrated system” theory claims that during language production, gesture and speech arise from the same semiotic starting point, and even though the two modalities ultimately represent semantic information in two different ways, they play equally important roles in capturing the meaning of an utterance.
Most theories and models of gesture production place a central focus on the semantic and pragmatic functions of gesture ( de Ruiter, in press Hostetter & Alibali, 2008 Kendon, 2004 Kita & Özyürek, 2003 McNeill, 1992, 2005). We conclude that metaphoric gestures help with some-but not all-novel speech sounds in a FL, suggesting that gesture and speech are phonemically integrated to differing extents depending on the nature of the gesture and/or speech sound. However, for the length contrasts, there was no such clear and consistent pattern, and in fact, congruent gestures made speech processing more effortful. For intonational contrasts, identification was more accurate for congruent gestures and less accurate for incongruent gestures relative to the baseline no gesture condition. English speaking adults listened to Japanese length contrasts and sentence-final intonational distinctions in the context of congruent, incongruent and no gestures. To address this gap, we explored the role that metaphoric gestures play in perceiving FL speech sounds that varied on two dimensions: length and intonation. However, much less is known about the role of hand gestures in lower-level language processes, such as perception of phonemes. It is well established that hand gestures affect comprehension and learning of semantic aspects of a foreign language (FL).
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