Manual accents.

Most people are unaware of the gestures they make while talking. It has been claimed that speech and gesture derive from a common source, and the information about thought processes that gestures convey complements or reinforces the simultaneous information provided by speech. For instance, if we compare French "il traverse le fleuve en nageant" with English "he is swimming across the river", gestures indicating the swimmer's path tend to fall on the verb in French and other Romance languages (plus Japanese), while they fall on the adverbial in English and other non-Romance Indo-European languages (plus Chinese). What then happens when people subsequently learn a language unlike their own in this respect? Non-native gestures assume considerable importance in investigating this question, since they act as windows onto the speaker's 'thinking for speaking' in their L2. To investigate this question ourselves, we examined the use of 'path' gestures in descriptions of motion events. Native speakers of English, Dutch and Spanish participated in the study, with the latter two groups also performing in English. The results show that there are language-specific gestural patterns, and that they are often transferred to L2. These 'manual accents' suggest that the importance of gesture in the study of second language acquisition should not be underestimated, because gestures may reveal L1-based thinking patterns not detectable in otherwise fluent and correct L2 speech. Consequently, we should reflect carefully on what it means to 'become bilingual'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]