Production rather than observation: comparison between the roles of embodiment and conceptual metaphor in L2 lexical tone learning

It remains unclear how embodiment and conceptual metaphor play a role in second language (L2) lexical tone learning. The present study aimed to examine the roles of pitch gesture production (PP), pitch feature observation (PO), and word-picture association (WA) approach in L2 lexical tone learning. Participants were 90 undergraduate students with Mandarin as their native language. Participants learned Thai lexical tones via the three approaches and completed tone discrimination, tone identification, and word-picture matching tasks. The PP performed better than the PO and WA in discriminating between and identifying specific tones. The PP was more accurate than the WA in word-picture matching. The pitch gesture production's embodiment was superior to the pitch feature observation's conceptual metaphor in learning L2 lexical tones. However, its role was affected by lexical tones' pitch features, test tasks, and learners' tonal experience.