Gestures and Lexical Access Problems in German as Second Language

Abstract

Gestures receive growing attention in the field of Second Language Acquisition but still there is a scarcity of research that looks at them as a part of multimodal communication through the use of interactional approach. The present study aims to explore the interplay of gestures in oral production in German as second language and the lexical access problems. It looks at the principal gesture functions in communication (referential, discursive, interactional, autostimulative) and adapts the NEUROGES typology by Lausberg and Sloetjes (2009) who distinguish gestures that depict image, conventional, emotional, pointing, emphatic, autostimulative gestures The purpose of the study is to see what kind of gestures occurs with the lexical access problems in German SL oral communication and if any gestural types depend on L2 proficiency and fluency. To answer these research questions the speech of 6 Spanish/Catalan (L1) students of German (L2) was analyzed. The participants varied in their proficiency (intermediate, upper-intermediate, advanced levels) and fluency. The data were taken from the VARCOM Corpus of the University of Barcelona. There were the videotaped dialogues between the students of German and German native speakers who participated in communication and were instructed to prompt the information from their interviewees during the argumentation task. During the analysis the cases with lexical access problems in speech, the involved lexical items (abstract or concrete) and the hand gestures were identified and coded in the ELAN annotator device. The study reflects on the tendencies in the gestural trajectory and dynamics, the start-time of gestures regarding to the target word (before, together, after it) and the principal communicative functions of gestures at the moments of word-searches in speech...