Effects of observing or producing hand gestures on non-native speakers’ auditory learning of Japanese short and long vowels

Abstract

This study examined whether auditory training coupled with hand gesture can improve non-native speakers’ auditory learning of phonemic vowel length contrasts in Japanese. Hirata and Kelly (2010) found that observing hand gesture that moved along with the rhythm of spoken short and long vowels in Japanese did not uniquely contribute to non-native speakers’ auditory learning. The present study compared effects of four types of training to examine whether there is a more effective method: (1) producing syllabic-rhythm gesture, (2) observing syllabic-rhythm gesture, (3) producing moraic-rhythm gesture, and (4) observing moraic-rhythm gesture. Each of native English speakers (N = 88) participated in one of the four types of training in four sessions, and took a pretest and a posttest that measured their ability to auditorily identify the vowel length of novel words without hand gesture. Tested disyllable pairs had the contrast in the first and the second syllables, spoken in sentences at slow and fast rates. Results showed that all four groups improved significantly (9%), but the amount of improvement did not differ. However, ‘observing syllabic-rhythm gesture’ was the only condition in which auditory learning was balanced between the first and the second syllable contexts and between the slow and fast rates.