Effects of producing pitch gestures on the production of Chinese tones

Abstract

Previous studies have shown the beneficial role of observing pitch gestures, which refer to hand movements mimicking pitch heights and contours in speech, in improving the perception of L2 tones by non-tonal language speakers. However, little is known about the potential benefits of training speakers to perform pitch gestures on tone pronunciation both during training - simultaneously imitating tone and gesture - and after training. The present study has two complementary aims. First, to investigate whether a brief 3-minute training session with performing pitch gestures while imitating the four Mandarin tones can improve non-tonal language speakers’ ability to imitate the target tones after training. Second, to investigate whether the simultaneous production of the target tones during training is more accurate when accompanied by pitch gestures. In a between-subjects design, 50 Catalan-Spanish bilinguals were randomly divided into two groups: (a) the No-Gesture group (NG), in which the participants imitated tone words without gestures, and (b) the Gesture group (G), in which they imitated the same tone words while simultaneously producing pitch gestures. All participants underwent a tone imitation task before and after training. The results showed that a brief 3- minute training involving pitch gestures was not more effective than training without pitch gestures in promoting a more accurate production of the Mandarin tones after training. However, upon closer examination of the target production of the tones during training, further analyses revealed that producing pitch gestures did improve imitation accuracy of Tone 3, which is considered the most challenging tone to learn.