Zhan, T.; Yang, D.; Wu, R.; Tian, X.

The role of gestures in speech learning is an important research topic in pedagogy, linguistics, and psychology. However, previous studies have mostly focused on the effects of gesture learning on semantics other than lower-level lexical-phonological features. The present study investigated the effects of manual gestures on learning lexical stress for native Chinese speakers. Across a series of experiments, we demonstrated that the gestures with congruent representational relations to auditory stimuli can facilitate the learning of lexical stress of both familiar (English) and unknown (Russian) languages, but not pseudowords. In addition, gestures with trajectory matching the stress at given positions benefit learning the stress of trained words, whereas gestures with only timing match with segments but without amplitude differences can generalize the learning effects to untrained stimuli. Furthermore, in the EEG experiment, we found that gesture-accompanied learning was associated with power increase and inter-trial coherence (ITC) decrease in the theta band at the time windows corresponding to different stress positions. These results suggest that the faciliatory effects of gestures on lexical stress learning depend on the specificity of cross-modal feature mapping at the phonological level, mediated by the neural modulation of early auditory perceptual responses.