The effects of situated gestures on Mandarin Chinese word learning

This study investigated the impact of gestures on learning new Mandarin Chinese lexicon in a classroom environment. It compared the differences between observing and producing a gesture, and examined whether repeating a gesture in a representative context improved learning outcomes. It also examined these effects on the acquisition of concrete and emotional words. Fifty-eight students were exposed to 32 new words under four conditions: no gestures, gesture observation, gesture production, and situated gestures. Memory performance was assessed through two translation tests and one recognition test, administered 25 min after learning and one week later. The results showed that gestures performed in a situation led to significantly better immediate recall than the other conditions in both the translation and recognition tests. These findings suggest that contextually grounded gestures can improve L2 acquisition, particularly for emotional words. • Repeating an iconic gesture while imagining onself in a representative context enhances the retention of L2 words. • Context plays a critical role in the acquisition of emotional words in L2. • Both observing and repeating gestures result in comparable learning outcomes.