Brief training with rhythmic beat gestures benefits L2 pronunciation

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of beat gesture observation on the acquisition of native-like speech patterns in English by examining the effect of a brief training with or without beat gestures on participants’ ratings of accentedness. In a within-subjects design, twenty Catalan-dominant undergraduate students learning English as a Foreign Language at an upper-intermediate level were shown a training video in which a native speaker of English gave short responses to 12 prompts. For half of the responses, the instructor used co-speech rhythmic beat gestures, while in the other half, she did not gesture at all. Participants’ answers to the prompts were recorded before and after training and evaluated by five native speaker judges. The results demonstrated that while beat gesture training did not significantly improve the participants’ accentedness ratings on the entire set of items, their performance on initially difficult items improved significantly as a result of beat gesture training.