Department of Philosophy and Humanities, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
PLoS One. 2023 Feb 1;18(2):e0280543. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0280543. eCollection 2023.
What kind of practice makes perfect when children learn to use grammatical morphemes in a second language? Gestures are communicative hand and arm movements which teachers naturally employ as a teaching tool in the classroom. Gesture theory has proposed that gestures package information and previous studies suggest their value for teaching specific items, such as words, as well as abstract systems, such as language. There is broad consensus that implicit learning mechanisms in children are more developed than explicit ones and that everyday use of grammar is implicit and entails developing implicit knowledge. However, while many learners have difficulties acquiring new morpho-syntactic structures, such as the plural{-s} and 3rd person possessive {-s} in English, research on gesture and syntax in middle childhood remains rare. The present study (N = 19) was conducted to better understand if gestures which embody grammatical morphemes during instruction can contribute to procedural learning. Using a novel task, the gesture speeded fragment completion task, our behavioral results show a decrease in mean response times after instruction in the test condition utilizing syntactically specific gestures. This increase in procedural learning suggests that learners in this age group can benefit from embodied instruction in the classroom which visually differentiates between grammatical morphemes which differ in meaning but sound the same.
当儿童学习第二语言中的语法形态时，哪种练习最有效？手势是一种交际性的手部和手臂动作，教师在课堂上自然会将其用作教学工具。手势理论提出，手势可以将信息打包，并且先前的研究表明手势在教授特定项目（如单词）以及抽象系统（如语言）方面具有价值。人们普遍认为，儿童的内隐学习机制比外显学习机制更发达，并且日常使用语法是内隐的，需要发展内隐知识。然而，尽管许多学习者在学习新的形态句法结构（例如英语中的复数{-s}和第三人称所有格{-s}）方面存在困难，但关于儿童时期手势和语法的研究仍然很少。本研究（N=19）旨在更好地理解在教学过程中体现语法形态的手势是否有助于程序性学习。使用一种新颖的任务，即手势加速片段完成任务，我们的行为结果表明，在利用语法上特定的手势进行测试条件的教学后，平均反应时间会减少。这种程序性学习的增加表明，这个年龄段的学习者可以从课堂上的具身教学中受益，这种教学可以直观地区分在意义上不同但发音相同的语法形态。
