Non-native Listeners Benefit Less from Gestures and Visible Speech than Native Listeners During Degraded Speech Comprehension.
Linda Drijvers, Asli Özyürek
PMID 30795715WHAT IT FOUND
Highly proficient German listeners of Dutch understood degraded Dutch verbs better when the speaker's lips were visible and iconic gestures were present.
The benefit was largest with moderate degradation, but smaller than in native Dutch listeners.
Key findings
01Non-native listeners identified more verbs correctly when visible speech and an iconic gesture were both present than when visible speech alone was present.
02The benefit of adding gesture to visible speech was largest at moderate 6-band noise-vocoding.
03Native listeners showed larger gesture and combined enhancement effects than non-native listeners.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study included only 23 highly proficient German listeners of Dutch, so it does not show how clients with language disorders, hearing loss, low proficiency, or other first languages would perform. The paper states 23 participants, but the analysed number is not clearly reported. The comparison with native listeners used data from an earlier study, not a native group tested at the same time, and the authors said this comparison should be made carefully. The task used single action verbs and laboratory noise-vocoding, not everyday conversation, real background noise, or clinical speech therapy outcomes. Clear speech showed little difference, probably because performance was near ceiling.
Declared interests
The work was funded by a Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research grant. No commercial funder, competing interest, or author payment from a company is reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as proof that gestures or lip-reading are effective therapy for non-native clients. The study tested healthy German listeners of Dutch in a laboratory verb task, and their benefit from visible speech and gesture was smaller than native listeners' benefit, especially when speech was severely degraded.