Talking with your hands can make a difference, says study

Hand gestures generally helped study participants to understand lexical stress patterns in English. Photo: AFP

There's always a good reason to learn a foreign language. But it's not always easy to achieve a level of fluency that allows you to express yourself with ease in an idiom that isn't your own. One study claims that there's a simple technique for speaking languages that involve lexical stress: talking with your hands.

A research team at New York University in Shanghai has examined the role that gestures can play in the learning of languages that use lexical stress, pronouncing certain syllables with more stress than others, putting emphasis on specific parts of words.