Gesturing key part of language-learning app created by CU-Boulder students
Jan. 29, 2015 Kevin Gould
The latest research shows that speech is inherently linked to gesturing. With that in mind, two CU-Boulder doctoral students in cognitive linguistics have created a language game app combining gesturing and words with the latest technology that they say will make it easier to learn a second language. It’s called “Nano Nano,” and co-inventor Kevin Gould says it’s a more efficient way to learn a new language.
CUT 1 “When we talk about grasping a concept, it’s not just the language center of the brain that lights up but also the motor cortex of the brain that lights up as well -- the part of the brain that’s actually responsible for physically manipulating and grasping objects. (:12) So there’s a synergy between gesture and language and what we thought about was well why don’t we try to co-op that and use that to create a more efficient form of language-learning software that’s different and at the same time more effective than traditional paradigms like you’d would see in other language software, like, for example Rosetta Stone.” (:30)
Gould says one of the keys to learning a language faster is to associate certain words with certain gestures.
CUT 2 “For example, if I teach you the word “give” in Spanish – dar - and I teach it to you with this iconic gesture where you, for example, move your hand away from your body, you’re actually going to learn that word faster than if you didn’t have that gesture associated with it. So that’s the basic idea behind it.” (:16)
Created with his partner Steve Duman, Gould’s “Nano Nano” is a story-based game with the main character battling a mad scientist who uses robots called “nanobots” to destroy words. Faced with varying scenarios, the main character must decipher which words are missing and replace them with the correct words.
CUT 3 “She’s an inventor so she’s able to invent this visor that shows these little nano-bots taking away the words and her job is to stop these nano-bots from taking the words away. And we put her in all these very common sort of language use scenarios in a restaurant, in a bank, in a market, and she has to kind of save the day by saving languages, as it were. (18) People will be talking to her and there’ll just suddenly be a word missing and you have to replace that word and use context and visual cues and stuff like that in order to find the right word to solve the puzzle.”
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So how do you actually gesture using this app? Gould says the language game app is designed to work with Apple devices like iPhones, iPads, tablets or other smart phones, which already have motion detection software on them.
CUT 4 “What’s unique about it is that no one has tried to do what we’re doing with gesture - for starters. This is pretty new. No one’s applied it to the technology that’s

available now - the iPads, the iPhone, your tablets and your smartphones, which have gesture recognition built into them. (:16) They have these affordances like accelerometers, gyroscopes, touch screens, so we can use those in order to get people gesturing while they’re learning language and we can get people to associate words with gestures using kind of a game-based platform, which is the basic idea behind what we’re doing.” (:32)
And because it’s a game-based platform Gould believes people will stay with the program longer than typical language learning software programs.
CUT 5 “Between the use of gesture and the use of a game we think this can be pretty good because a game keeps people coming back. One of the biggest issues that other language learning software’s platforms have had is that they have really high attrition rates. There’s no kind of extrinsic motivation. Whereas when you have a game what happens is the game keeps prompting you to come back. You want to achieve goals in the game. (:21) If you’re just learning Portuguese to learn
Portuguese, you have to be motivating yourself to do it. So the game is something that provides people with a tool to keep going essentially. (:29)
“Nano Nano” is currently available in Spanish, but Gould says he and Duman designed the game to be compatible with multiple languages. They plan on English next and from there, converting the app into Mandarin Chinese, French and German.
They also hope to make it available on Android devices.
“Nano Nano” is available for download from Apple App Store.
-CU-