We evaluated the impact of gestures on second language (L2) vocabulary learning with nouns (Experiment 1) and verbs (Experiment 2). Four training methods were compared: the learning of L2 words with congruent gestures, incongruent gestures, meaningless gestures, and no gestures. Better vocabulary learning was found in both experiments when participants learned L2 words with congruent gestures relative to the no gesture condition. This result indicates that gestures have a positive effect on L2 learning when there is a match between the word meaning and the gesture. However, the recall of words in the incongruent and meaningless gesture conditions was lower than that of the no gesture condition. This suggests that gestures might have a negative impact on L2 learning. The facilitation and interference effects we found with the use of gestures in L2 vocabulary acquisition are discussed.

Theories of reading development generally agree that, in addition to phonological decoding, some kind of orthographic processing skill underlies the ability to learn to read words. However, there is a lack of clarity as to which aspect(s) of orthographic processing are key in reading development. We test here whether this is orthographic knowledge and/or orthographic learning. Whereas orthographic knowledge has been argued to reflect a child’s existing store of orthographic representations, orthographic learning is concerned with the ability to form these representations. In a longitudinal study of second- and third-grade students, we evaluate the relations between these two aspects of orthographic processing and word-reading outcomes. The results of our analyses show that variance captured by orthographic knowledge overlaps with that of word reading, to the point that they form a single latent word-reading factor. In contrast, orthographic learning is distinctive from this factor. Further, structural equation modeling demonstrates that early orthographic learning was related to gains in word reading skills. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of word-reading development.

Familiarity, emotionality, motor activity, memorability, and vividness of visual imagery ratings, on 7-point scales, were collected for 536 Spanish action-related sentences, including a corpus of 439 phrases originally normed in Swedish, German, and Croatian (Arar & Molander, 1996; Molander & Arar, 1998; Molander, Arar, Mavrinac, & Janig, 1999) and 97 new sentences describing actions usually performed using different body postures and face or hand movements. These norms constitute the only available set of ratings for action sentences in Spanish including those dimensions to date, and they allow for the design of studies aimed at empirically exploring the relationship between action, language, and cognition with well-controlled materials in Spanish-speaking samples of participants.

Previous research investigating the relationship between language proficiency and iconic gesture use has produced inconsistent findings. This study investigated whether a linear relationship was assumed although it is a quadratic relationship. Iconic co-speech gesture use by 4- to 6-year-old French–Japanese bilinguals with two levels of French proficiency (intermediate and low) but similar levels of Japanese proficiency was compared with that of high-proficiency French monolinguals (Study 1) and Japanese monolinguals with similar proficiency to the bilinguals (Study 2). To control the information participants communicated, a dynamic referential communication task was used; a difference between two cartoons had to be communicated to an experimenter. Study 1 showed a significant quadratic relationship between proficiency and iconic gesture use in French; the intermediate-proficiency bilinguals gestured least among the three proficiency groups. The monolingual and bilingual groups with similar Japanese proficiency in Study 2 gestured at similar rates. It is suggested that children gestured for different reasons depending on their language proficiency and the cognitive resources available for the task.

Most current models of nonnative speech perception (e.g., extended perceptual assimilation model, PAM-L2, Best & Tyler, 2007; speech learning model, Flege, 1995; native language magnet model, Kuhl, 1993) base their predictions on the native/nonnative status of individual phonetic/phonological segments. This paper demonstrates that the phonotactic properties of Japanese influence the perception of natively contrasting consonants and suggests that phonotactic influence must be formally incorporated in these models. We first propose that by extending the perceptual categories outlined in PAM-L2 to incorporate sequences of sounds, we can account for the effects of differences in native and nonnative phonotactics on nonnative and cross-language segmental perception. In addition, we test predictions based on such an extension in two perceptual experiments. In Experiment 1, Japanese listeners categorized and rated vowel–consonant–vowel strings in combinations that either obeyed or violated Japanese phonotactics. The participants categorized phonotactically illegal strings to the perceptually nearest (legal) categories. In Experiment 2, participants discriminated the same strings in AXB discrimination tests. Our results show that Japanese listeners are more accurate and have faster response times when discriminating between legal strings than between legal and illegal strings. These findings expose serious shortcomings in currently accepted nonnative perception models, which offer no framework for the influence of native language phonotactics.