Núria Esteve‐gibert
Biographic Data
| ID | 1464059 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Núria Esteve‐gibert |
| GIVEN NAMES | Núria |
| FAMILY NAME | Esteve‐gibert |
| SIGNATURE | GIBERT N E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Universitat Oberta de Catalunya |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2408-5849 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Introduction to the special issue ‘Multimodal prosody
The objective of this special issue is to present innovative research demonstrating that prosody needs to be reconceptualized as an inherently multimodal phenomenon, manifested across the spoken and/or visual domains. The studies included are organized into three core themes. Theme 1 addresses the temporal alignment of spoken and visual aspects of prosody, and how this is shaped by linguistic factors, speaker-specific traits (such as neurodiversi…
Head Gestures Do Not Serve as Precursors of Prosodic Focus Marking in the Second Language as They Do in the First Language
Research shows that children use head gestures to mark discourse focus before developing the required prosodic cues in their first language (L1), and their gestures affect the prosodic parameters of their speech. We investigated whether head gestures also act as precursors and bootstrappers of prosodic focus marking in second language (L2) acquisition. Catalan adults produced English utterances in broad, contrastive, and corrective focus. We anal…
How a modality-neutral prosodic dimension can enrich the multimodal language acquisition framework
Like Karadöller and colleagues, we believe that any language acquisition framework needs to incorporate visual expressions in sign language as well as co-speech gestures in spoken languages. To do so, Karadöller and colleagues focus on deictic and iconic aspects of visual expressions, which convey semantic meaning. Our proposal is that a multimodal language acquisition framework also needs to account for non-referential body movements because the…
Emotional suffering in school-aged children and adolescents with and without developmental language disorder
Preschoolers Mark Focus Types Through Multimodal Prominence
The present cross-sectional study assessed the role of multimodal cues in marking focus types during early childhood, focusing on prosodic prominence, gesture presence, and gestural prominence. A total of 116 Catalan-speaking three-, four- and five-year-olds participated in a semi-controlled interactive task eliciting words in three focus conditions: information, contrastive, and corrective. The data were coded manually using holistic assessments…
How Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder Use Prosody and Gestures to Process Phrasal Ambiguities
Prosody is crucial for resolving phrasal ambiguities. Recent research suggests that gestures can enhance this process, which may be especially useful for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), who have impaired structural language. This study investigates how children with DLD use prosodic and gestural cues to interpret phrasal ambiguities. Catalan-speaking children with and without DLD heard sentences with two possible interpretati…
Towards a novel conceptualization of prosody that accounts for spoken and visual signals
Prosody influences speech organization by signaling phrasal prominence, grouping patterns, and speakers’ pragmatic intentions. While traditionally viewed as restricted to speech, research shows prosody is also conveyed visually. This article reviews research showing strong parallels between spoken prosody and co-speech gestures in prominence marking, grouping phrasal structures, and signaling pragmatic intent. We extend this discussion and propos…
Development of Phrase-Level Prosody From Infancy to Late Childhood
This chapter reviews the state-of-the-art research on phrase-level prosodic development. The chapter first discusses prosodic variation in early vocalizations, its communicative connotations, and perception of tonal patterns and prosodic phrases in infancy. Second, it reviews the main findings on development in the inventory of phonologically distinct tonal patterns (i.e. pitch accents, boundary tones) and in prosodic phrasing and rhythm from the…
The Development of Prosody in First Language Acquisition
Prosodic development is increasingly recognized as a fundamental stepping stone in first language acquisition. Prosodic sensitivity starts developing very early, with newborns becoming attuned to the prosodic properties of the ambient language, and it continues to develop during childhood until early adolescence. In the last decades, a flourishing literature has reported on the varied set of prosodic skills that children acquire and how they inte…
Developmental and cognitive aspects of children’s disbelief comprehension through intonation and facial gesture
This article investigates how children leverage intonational and gestural cues to an individual’s belief state through unimodal (intonation-only or facial gesture-only) and multimodal (intonation + facial gesture) cues. A total of 187 preschoolers (ages 3–5) participated in a disbelief comprehension task and were assessed for Theory of Mind (ToM) ability using a false belief task. Significant predictors included age, condition and success on the …
Intonation and gesture as bootstrapping devices in speaker uncertainty
This study investigates 3- to 5-year-old children’s sensitivity to lexical, intonational and gestural information in the comprehension of speaker uncertainty. Most previous studies on children’s understanding of speaker certainty and uncertainty across languages have focused on the comprehension of lexical markers, and little is known about the potential facilitation effects of intonational and gestural features in this process. A total of 102 3-…
Twelve‐Month‐Olds Understand Social Intentions Based on Prosody and Gesture Shape
Infants infer social and pragmatic intentions underlying attention‐directing gestures, but the basis on which infants make these inferences is not well understood. Previous studies suggest that infants rely on information from preceding shared action contexts and joint perceptual scenes. Here, we tested whether 12‐month‐olds use information from act‐accompanying cues, in particular prosody and hand shape, to guide their pragmatic understanding. I…
Prosody signals the emergence of intentional communication in the first year of life
There is considerable debate about whether early vocalizations mimic the target language and whether prosody signals emergent intentional communication. A longitudinal corpus of four Catalan-babbling infants was analyzed to investigate whether children use different prosodic patterns to distinguish communicative from investigative vocalizations and to express intentionality. A total of 2,701 vocalizations from 0;7 to 0;11 were coded acoustically …
How Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder Use Prosody and Gestures to Process Phrasal Ambiguities
Prosody is crucial for resolving phrasal ambiguities. Recent research suggests that gestures can enhance this process, which may be especially useful for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), who have impaired structural language. This study investigates how children with DLD use prosodic and gestural cues to interpret phrasal ambiguities. Catalan-speaking children with and without DLD heard sentences with two possible interpretati…
Towards a novel conceptualization of prosody that accounts for spoken and visual signals
Prosody influences speech organization by signaling phrasal prominence, grouping patterns, and speakers’ pragmatic intentions. While traditionally viewed as restricted to speech, research shows prosody is also conveyed visually. This article reviews research showing strong parallels between spoken prosody and co-speech gestures in prominence marking, grouping phrasal structures, and signaling pragmatic intent. We extend this discussion and propos…
Prosody signals the emergence of intentional communication in the first year of life
There is considerable debate about whether early vocalizations mimic the target language and whether prosody signals emergent intentional communication. A longitudinal corpus of four Catalan-babbling infants was analyzed to investigate whether children use different prosodic patterns to distinguish communicative from investigative vocalizations and to express intentionality. A total of 2,701 vocalizations from 0;7 to 0;11 were coded acoustically …
Intonation and gesture as bootstrapping devices in speaker uncertainty
This study investigates 3- to 5-year-old children’s sensitivity to lexical, intonational and gestural information in the comprehension of speaker uncertainty. Most previous studies on children’s understanding of speaker certainty and uncertainty across languages have focused on the comprehension of lexical markers, and little is known about the potential facilitation effects of intonational and gestural features in this process. A total of 102 3-…
Twelve‐Month‐Olds Understand Social Intentions Based on Prosody and Gesture Shape
Infants infer social and pragmatic intentions underlying attention‐directing gestures, but the basis on which infants make these inferences is not well understood. Previous studies suggest that infants rely on information from preceding shared action contexts and joint perceptual scenes. Here, we tested whether 12‐month‐olds use information from act‐accompanying cues, in particular prosody and hand shape, to guide their pragmatic understanding. I…
The Development of Prosody in First Language Acquisition
Prosodic development is increasingly recognized as a fundamental stepping stone in first language acquisition. Prosodic sensitivity starts developing very early, with newborns becoming attuned to the prosodic properties of the ambient language, and it continues to develop during childhood until early adolescence. In the last decades, a flourishing literature has reported on the varied set of prosodic skills that children acquire and how they inte…
Developmental and cognitive aspects of children’s disbelief comprehension through intonation and facial gesture
This article investigates how children leverage intonational and gestural cues to an individual’s belief state through unimodal (intonation-only or facial gesture-only) and multimodal (intonation + facial gesture) cues. A total of 187 preschoolers (ages 3–5) participated in a disbelief comprehension task and were assessed for Theory of Mind (ToM) ability using a false belief task. Significant predictors included age, condition and success on the …
Development of Phrase-Level Prosody From Infancy to Late Childhood
This chapter reviews the state-of-the-art research on phrase-level prosodic development. The chapter first discusses prosodic variation in early vocalizations, its communicative connotations, and perception of tonal patterns and prosodic phrases in infancy. Second, it reviews the main findings on development in the inventory of phonologically distinct tonal patterns (i.e. pitch accents, boundary tones) and in prosodic phrasing and rhythm from the…
Towards a novel conceptualization of prosody that accounts for spoken and visual signals
Prosody influences speech organization by signaling phrasal prominence, grouping patterns, and speakers’ pragmatic intentions. While traditionally viewed as restricted to speech, research shows prosody is also conveyed visually. This article reviews research showing strong parallels between spoken prosody and co-speech gestures in prominence marking, grouping phrasal structures, and signaling pragmatic intent. We extend this discussion and propos…
Head Gestures Do Not Serve as Precursors of Prosodic Focus Marking in the Second Language as They Do in the First Language
Research shows that children use head gestures to mark discourse focus before developing the required prosodic cues in their first language (L1), and their gestures affect the prosodic parameters of their speech. We investigated whether head gestures also act as precursors and bootstrappers of prosodic focus marking in second language (L2) acquisition. Catalan adults produced English utterances in broad, contrastive, and corrective focus. We anal…
How a modality-neutral prosodic dimension can enrich the multimodal language acquisition framework
Like Karadöller and colleagues, we believe that any language acquisition framework needs to incorporate visual expressions in sign language as well as co-speech gestures in spoken languages. To do so, Karadöller and colleagues focus on deictic and iconic aspects of visual expressions, which convey semantic meaning. Our proposal is that a multimodal language acquisition framework also needs to account for non-referential body movements because the…
Emotional suffering in school-aged children and adolescents with and without developmental language disorder
Preschoolers Mark Focus Types Through Multimodal Prominence
The present cross-sectional study assessed the role of multimodal cues in marking focus types during early childhood, focusing on prosodic prominence, gesture presence, and gestural prominence. A total of 116 Catalan-speaking three-, four- and five-year-olds participated in a semi-controlled interactive task eliciting words in three focus conditions: information, contrastive, and corrective. The data were coded manually using holistic assessments…
How Children With and Without Developmental Language Disorder Use Prosody and Gestures to Process Phrasal Ambiguities
Prosody is crucial for resolving phrasal ambiguities. Recent research suggests that gestures can enhance this process, which may be especially useful for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), who have impaired structural language. This study investigates how children with DLD use prosodic and gestural cues to interpret phrasal ambiguities. Catalan-speaking children with and without DLD heard sentences with two possible interpretati…
Introduction to the special issue ‘Multimodal prosody
The objective of this special issue is to present innovative research demonstrating that prosody needs to be reconceptualized as an inherently multimodal phenomenon, manifested across the spoken and/or visual domains. The studies included are organized into three core themes. Theme 1 addresses the temporal alignment of spoken and visual aspects of prosody, and how this is shaped by linguistic factors, speaker-specific traits (such as neurodiversi…
Psychology (11 works) · Hearing Impairment and Communication (10 works) · Linguistics (10 works) · Language Development and Disorders (9 works) · Prosody (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Gesture (7 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (4 works) · Cognitive psychology (4 works) · Intonation (linguistics) (4 works)