This paper investigates whether advanced Danish learners of Italian are able to acquire speech and gesture patterns typical of a typologically different target language and consequently move away from patterns typical of their L1. Results show that the Danish learners are able to acquire and use typical Italian lexicalization patterns, but more importantly their L2 speech-gesture co-expressivity reveals that they have reorganized semantic representations and shifted attention towards new types of information.
Second Language Acquisition, motion events, thinking for speaking, gesture, conceptualization.
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