Elucidating the influences of embodiment and conceptual metaphor on lexical and non-speech tone learning.

In the contexts of language learning and music processing, hand gestures conveying acoustic information visually influence perception of speech and non-speech sounds (Connell et al., 2013; Morett & Chang, 2015). Currently, it is unclear whether this effect is due to these gestures' use of the human body to highlight relevant features of language (embodiment) or the cross-modal mapping between the visual motion trajectories of these gestures and corresponding auditory features (conceptual metaphor).