Head Gestures Do Not Serve as Precursors of Prosodic Focus Marking in the Second Language as They Do in the First Language

Research shows that children use head gestures to mark discourse focus before developing the required prosodic cues in their first language (L1), and their gestures affect the prosodic parameters of their speech. We investigated whether head gestures also act as precursors and bootstrappers of prosodic focus marking in second language (L2) acquisition. Catalan adults produced English utterances in broad, contrastive, and corrective focus. We analyzed (the alignment between) prosodic and gestural correlates of focus. Replication in an L2 context showed that learners used gestures in focus marking but transferred both prosodic and gestural L1 patterns to their L2, lengthening phrase final elements, producing them with a wider F0 range, and accompanying them with a gesture more often than nonphrase final elements. This suggests that gesture and prosody are tightly connected in this context, inhibiting the bootstrapping function of gesture. Hence, L2 learners highlight the same, possibly inaccurate, part of an utterance in both modalities.