Foreigner Directed Gesture: larger, faster, longer

This paper addresses the issue of foreigner talk from the perspective of multimodal communication. More specifically, it aims at analysing to what extent native speakers (NS) adapt their non-verbal behaviour (in this case manual co-verbal gestures) when interacting with non-native speakers (NNS). Our study is based on a sample of NS-NNS and NS-NS task-based interactions that were analysed using OpenPose estimations to derive kinematic data on the spatial and temporal dimensions of gesture production. On the basis of the existing literature, it was hypothesized that non-verbal foreigner talk would be characterized by an increase in gesture rate, gesture duration, hold rate and duration, gesture size, gesture trajectory and gesture velocity. Whereas our findings do not support the hypothesis that NS produce more gestures when interacting with NNS, they show that NS use gestures that are larger in size (mainly in the horizontal dimension), that are more diverse in the vertical dimension, that are performed faster and that cover a larger trajectory. These findings confirm that foreigner talk manifests itself in formal features of non-verbal communication and call for more research on the exact role of multimodal foreigner talk in multilingual communication as well as on its potential effects on non-native speakers’ attitudes and language proficiency.