Training English Lexical Stress With Cue-Signaling Gestures for Chinese Adolescents Across Different Stress and Intonation Patterns

PURPOSE: This study proposes three cue-signaling gestures corresponding to duration, intensity, and pitch. The aims are to assess the effects of the three gestures on the perception and production of English stress across various intonation and stress patterns. METHOD: Seventy-nine Chinese adolescents aged 15.1 years were divided into three groups using the three gestures. Individual differences in age, gender, English learning experience, musical experience, phonological working memory, and auditory acuity were controlled across the groups. A perception and a production test were conducted in the pre- and posttests. Generalized linear and linear mixed-effects models were constructed to estimate the accuracy of stress identification and the acoustic characteristics of the stress production across the three groups, two stress patterns, and two intonations. RESULTS: The duration gesture group outperformed the other two groups in both perception and production, and the effect was generalized to untrained items. The trochaic pattern (strong-weak) was more challenging than the iambic pattern (weak-strong), and the stress in rising intonations caused more difficulty than in falling intonations. CONCLUSIONS: The duration gesture is more recommended for teaching English lexical stress, while the trochaic stress pattern, especially with rising intonations, requires additional attention. The current findings furnish novel implications for multimodal phonetic instruction; the visual and tactile modalities of gestures could be potentially helpful for individuals with pathological conditions.