- Making clear hand gestures helps highlight the correct parts of words
- Experts say doing so may help you sound like a native speaker
Learning a new language can be daunting – especially if you want to try to sound authentic.
Gestures while speaking may help you learn to speak like the locals, a new study suggests.
Researchers have found that making obvious hand gestures can help you focus on the correct parts of words.
Doing so may help you sound like a native speaker.
Some languages, such as English, Italian, and Russian, have lexical stress. This occurs when certain syllables within words are pronounced with significantly greater weight than others.
Researchers have found that making obvious hand gestures can help you focus on the correct parts of words. Doing so may help you sound like a native speaker (stock image)
In the word “language”, for example, the first syllable is stressed, while in the word “beginning” the stress is on the second syllable.
Researchers from New York University in Shanghai, China, recruited 124 native Chinese speakers between the ages of 18 and 28.
They watched videos of people performing 'up and down' hand movements, synchronized with recordings of English words.
All words consist of three syllables, but their lexical stress varies to fall on the first, last, or middle syllable.
Participants were divided into four groups, with one group watching videos that did not include any gestures at all.
The other three groups watched video clips that contained gestures over each syllable of each word, but only one of these groups saw an explicit gesture over the correct stressed syllable.
The analysis revealed that using spoken gestures to the correct part of a word helped participants identify lexical stress 10 to 15 percent more accurately than those who did not see any gestures (stock image).
Before and after watching the videos, participants were asked to press a button when they thought lexical stress was being applied to different words.
The analysis revealed that using visible gestures on the correct part of the word helped participants identify lexical stress 10 to 15 percent more accurately than those who did not see any gestures.
“Participants learned lexical stress of foreign languages by observing up-and-down hand movements synchronized with audio recordings of spoken words,” the team said.
“Our findings highlight the functional role of gestures in promoting speech learning, suggesting practical implications for language teaching and learning.”
The preprint of their study was published online by bioRxiv.
(Tags for translation) Daily Mail