Previous research indicates that using gestures in second language (L2) pronunciation instruction can support learning. Most previous research has focused on learners’ production and has reported positive effects, especially for gestures that are representative for the phonetic feature to be taught. Focus on perception is less common and results are mixed, particularly for vowel-length contrasts.
This study examines how gestures influence the perception of Swedish quantity, a known difficulty for L2 learners. Swedish quantity, a known difficulty for L2 learners, is realised as complementary lengthening in the rhyme of a stressed syllable, yielding one of two scenarios: (a) a long vowel followed by no or a short coda consonant (lila /liː.la/, sil /siːl/), or (b) a short vowel followed by a long or an ambisyllabic coda consonant (sill /sil/, lilla /lil.la/).
Forty Spanish-speaking learners participated in a pre-/posttest intervention. They watched an instructional video on Swedish quantity in one of two versions: with gestures or without. In the gesture condition, the instructor used long and short horizontal hand movements to illustrate vowel length. Perception was measured through an identification task embedded in an eye-tracking experiment. Preliminary analysis shows a general improvement after training, with a larger effect when gestures were used.
