Prosody and gestures in children with neurodevelopmental disorders.
Children with language disorders have difficulties in understanding others, particularly when they need to process statements with complex syntactic, semantic and pragmatic structures. In this project, we focus on speech prosody and body movements as oral strategies to help overcome these issues. Speakers use speech prosody and gestures in combination to indicate the limits of a phrase, mark thematic roles and convey communicative intentions. Our goal is to examine whether the presence of marked prosodic and gestural signals accompanying speakers' statements help children with neurodevelopmental disorders process pragmatic and discourse information. To do so, we use the paradigm of the visual monitoring of the visual world.
Here are some of the references on the initial results of this project:
Esteve-Gibert, N. (2023). La fonología y la prosodia en los niños y niñas con TDL. En: Sanz-Torrent, M. & Andreu, Ll. (Eds.,) El Trastorno del Desarrollo del Lenguaje (TDL): de la investigación a la práctica. Ediciones Pirámide.
Giberga, A. & Esteve-Gibert, N. (2022). Processing pragmatic meanings through gestures and prosody when lingusitic abilities are impaired: the case of children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). International Society for Gesture Studies (ISGS). July, Chicago (USA).
Giberga, A., Igualada, A., Ahufinger, N., Aguilera, M., Guerra, E., & Esteve-Gibert, N. (2023) Pragmatic and discursive development in children with Developmental Language Disorder: do prosody and gestures pave the way? International Pragmatics Association (IPrA). July, Brussels (Belgium)
The integration of prosody and gestures in the speech of children and adults.
Oral communication is multimodal, as speakers use all manner of communication strategies to convey their intended meaning. It is known that speech and body gestures are coordinated to this end and, in this line of research, we investigate how and why prosodic signals in speech have a special status in this relationship, in which: (1) prosodic markers appear to act as anchor points for the alignment of gestures, and (2) pragmatic and discursive meanings expressed through prosodic strategies run parallel to the pragmatic and discursive meanings expressed through body movements.
Here are some references on this line of research:
Esteve-Gibert, N., Loevenbruck, H., Dohen, M., & D'Imperio, M. (2022). Pre-schoolers use head gestures rather than typical prosodic cues to highlight important information in speech. Developmental Science 25(1), e13154.
Carignan, C., Esteve-Gibert, N., Lœvenbruck, H., Dohen, M, & D’Imperio, M. (2020). Strategies of head nod alignment with pitch prominence in French focus. Proceedings of the 12th International Seminar on Speech Production. December 2020.
Esteve-Gibert, N. & Guellaï, B. (2018). Prosody in the auditory and visual domains: a developmental perspective. Frontiers in Psychology. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00338
Esteve-Gibert, N., Borràs-Comes, J., Asor, E., Swerts, M., & Prieto, P. (2017). The timing of head movements: the role of prosodic heads and edges. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 141(6), 4727-4739.
Esteve-Gibert, N., Prieto, P. & Liszkowski, U. (2017). Twelve-month-olds understand social intentions based on prosody and gesture shape. Infancy 22(1), 108-129.
Multimodal strategies in the acquisition of second languages.
The acquisition of oral competence is a key challenge when learning a second language. In this line of research, we look at how prosody and body language help develop segmental and suprasegmental structures in a second language. Approaching multimodality from a broad perspective, we examine the visual signals of speech, hand and body gestures and body movements, as well as the proprioceptive feedback provided by the sense of touch.
Here are some references on this line of research:
Esteve-Gibert, N., Suárez, M., Feijoo, S., Vasylets, O., & Serrano, R. (under review). The children's learning of non-native phonology through tactile input, compared to visual and audio input.
Esteve-Gibert, N. & Muñoz. C. (2020, in press). Young children use object-label mapping more than visual speech cues to acquire non-native sounds. Applied Psycholinguistics 42(1), 77-100.
