The Influence Of Gestures On The English Stress Learning For Native Chinese Speaker

The role of gesture in speech learning is an important issue in pedagogy,linguistics and psychology.However,previous studies mostly focus on the effects of gesture learning on lexical semantic learning,but less on phonetic learning.Therefore,this study,including two behavioral experiments and one EEG experiment,collaboratively investigates the effect of up-and-down gestures on English word stress learning for native Chinese speaker.The results of the two behavioral experiments indicated that the gesture with representational relations to auditory stimuli could facilitate the learning of English stress.In addition,a sequence of gestures that matched the stress magnitude at given positions（stressed gesture）were more conducive to learning the stress pattern of trained words,whereas gestures that did not have amplitude differences in a sequence（consistent gesture）could generalize the learned stress pattern into untrained stimuli.The results of the EEG experiment further showed that the P2 component of the auditory neural response was affected by gesture learning,and the theta band power was enhanced at the corresponding temporal position with different stress positions after learning words.The consistent results of behavioral and EEG experiments support the theory of multisensory integration--the visual system can directly or indirectly affect the auditory system in the early stage of perception,thus promote the processing and learning of word stress.