Gesture and the materialization of second language prosody

Abstract

This study investigated the use of beat gestures (typically the sharp up-and-down movement of the hand) in conjunction with L2 speech production. The L2 participant, although in conversation with another person, synchronized his beats with the parsing of his words into syllables. Based on Gal' perin's formulation for the process of internalization, that the ideal or mental plane is built upon activity in the physical world (material plane), it is argued that the L2 participant deployed this metaphoric form of gesture as a multimodal, actional representation of syllabification to both externalize the phenomena to gain control over it (self-regulation) and to help solidify a conceptual foundation for this aspect of the underlying rhythmic pulse of English. Moreover, it is speculated that movement itself might prove to be part of SLA, that it establishes a physicalized (kinesic) sense of prosodic features of the L2, promoting automaticity and fluency.