Accentuating the positive: Can co-speech hand gestures improve judgments of foreign language accents?

Research has shown that non-native accented speech is consistently discriminated against, negatively affecting measures related to sociability, credibility and intelligence. Most research has studied accented speech by isolating it from other bodily cues, such as facial expressions, eye gaze and hand gestures. The present study explores the role of emblematic gesture in how listeners phonetically perceive and socially evaluate non-native accents. Testing in Japan, we had 48 monolingual Japanese speakers view videos of non-native speakers (from various other countries) in three conditions with dubbed identical speech: 1) No Gesture, e.g., saying, “It’s OK” in Japanese; 2) Speech + Culturally Congruent gesture, saying “It’s OK,” while making a large circle with both arms over the head (conventional in Japan); 3) Speech + Culturally Incongruent gesture, saying “It’s OK,” while making a small circle with the thumb and forefinger (conventional in the US). Participants were asked to rate the accent and make social evaluations about the non-native speakers. Japanese participants perceived speech most accurately in the Congruent and Incongruent conditions, F(2,90)=7.57, p< .001, partial η²=0.14. They also evaluated the accents as more “native like” in the Congruent vs. No Gesture condition, F(2,90)=4.99, p< .009, partial η²=0.1. In addition, there was a significant linear trend for confidence ratings, F(1,45)=29.62, p< .001, partial η²=0.40, with the following pattern: Congruent > Incongruent > No Gesture. Finally, participants judged speakers to be more culturally competent in the Congruent condition compared to the other two conditions, F(2,90)=6.16, p< .003, partial η²=0.12. The results suggest that during cross cultural communication, visual information conveyed through hand gesture influences low level phonetic perception, in addition to higher level social evaluation.