Gesturing with two languages at hand: How gesture reflects and facilitates second language learning
Principal Investigator: Dr. Wojciech Lewandowski
Funded by the DFG Heisenberg Programme.
This project examines typological variation in the expression of macro-events—such as motion and change-of-state—and explores their impact on nonverbal patterns, as revealed through gesture, and on the multimodal acquisition of additional languages. Funded by the DFG Heisenberg Programme.
Description
Based on the assumption that languages differ significantly in how they lexicalize macro-events, this project explores three main domains:
- Multimodal event construal — how language and gesture jointly shape the representation of events across typologically distinct languages (e.g., Spanish, German), in both physical and abstract domains. The focus is particularly on motion events (e.g., a person crossing a park, an idea crossing the mind) and change-of-state events (e.g., mowing the lawn short, wiping a table clean).
- Bilingual development — how typological differences in multimodal event construal affect second language acquisition, through the examination of bidirectional L1–L2 interactions in adult learners across varying proficiency levels.
- Gesture-enriched language teaching — how motion and change-of-state constructions in a typologically distinct L2 can be taught more effectively through multimodal, gesture-supported instruction, moving beyond earlier gesture-based approaches that primarily targeted vocabulary and pronunciation.
In parallel, the project contributes to macro-event typology by providing empirical insights into how event encoding is shaped by flexible, event-sensitive constructional choices. It emphasizes constrained cross- and intra-linguistic variation that complements and refines traditional language-type frameworks.
