While empirical studies have shown the beneficial role of observing and producing hand gestures mimicking pitch features in the learning of L2 tonal or intonational contrasts, mixed results have been obtained for the use of gestures encoding durational contrasts at the perceptual level. This study investigates the potential benefits of horizontal hand-sweep gestures encoding durational features for boosting the perception and production of nonnative vowel-length contrasts. In a between-subjects experiment with a pretest–posttest design, 50 Catalan participants without any knowledge of Japanese practiced perceiving and producing minimal pairs of Japanese disyllabic words featuring vowel-length contrasts in one of two conditions, namely with gestures or without them. Pretest and posttest consisted of the completion of identical vowel-length identification and imitation tasks. The results showed that while participants improved equally at posttest across the two conditions in the identification task, the Gesture group obtained a larger improvement than the No Gesture group in the imitation task. These results corroborate the claim that producing hand gestures encoding prosodic properties of speech may help naïve learners to learn novel phonological contrasts in a foreign language.

中文翻译：

---

观察和制作持续时间的手势有助于新元音长度对比的发音

虽然实证研究表明观察和产生模仿音高特征的手势在学习 L2 音调或语调对比中的有益作用，但在感知水平上使用编码持续时间对比的手势已经获得了混合结果。本研究调查了水平扫手手势编码持续特征的潜在好处，以促进非母语元音长度对比的感知和产生。在一项采用前测-后测设计的受试者间实验中，50 名加泰罗尼亚语参与者对日语一无所知，他们在两种情况之一（即有手势或没有手势）下练习感知和产生具有元音长度对比的最少的日语双音节词对。前测和后测包括完成相同的元音长度识别和模仿任务。结果表明，虽然参与者在识别任务中的两种条件下的后测改进相同，但在模仿任务中，手势组比无手势组获得了更大的改进。这些结果证实了这样一种说法，即产生编码语音韵律特性的手势可以帮助天真的学习者学习外语中新的语音对比。