Introduction to the special issue ‘Multimodal prosody
Prosody in the spoken and visual domains’
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 17811494 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Núria Esteve‐gibert (0000-0003-2408-5849, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, corresponding author), Pilar Prieto (0000-0001-8175-1081, Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats), Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel (0000-0003-0991-5541, Massachusetts Institute of Technology) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 18 |
| Publication date | 2026-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Language and Cognition (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1866-9808 • E-ISSN: 1866-9859 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/langcog.2026.10069 |
| OpenAlex | W7133564142 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 26 |
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 neurodiversity) and language learning patterns. Theme 2 deals with the coordination of spoken and visual aspects of prosody in conveying pragmatic intent, focusing on aspects such as negation, emotion and epistemic stance. Theme 3 explores how visual signals, including head movements and manual signals, fulfil essential prosodic roles across diverse sign language typologies. Taken together, the empirical evidence presented here shows that prosody is also embodied and that our bodily movements can manifest prosodic characteristics. On the one hand, they show the need to comprehensively re-evaluate our understanding of how speakers, listeners and learners engage with the prosodic dimension of language. On the other hand, they reveal that non-referential gestures are deeply meaningful and prosodically structured. Ultimately, visual cues are presented as indispensable for building accurate models of the human language capacity
Embodied cognition · Gesture · Prosody · Sign language · Spoken language · Hearing Impairment and Communication · Multisensory perception and integration · Phonetics and Phonology Research
Gesticulation and Speech
Gesture and speech in interaction
Multimodal training on L2 Japanese pitch accent
Facial expressions in different communication settings
‘This You May Nnnnnnever Have Heard Before’
Prosody of focus in Turkish Sign Language
Facial cues to anger affect meaning interpretation of subsequent spoken prosody
Multimodal-ish
Backchannel behavior is idiosyncratic
Deliberate synchronization of speech and gesture
Towards a novel conceptualization of prosody that accounts for spoken and visual signals
Talking heads” in Portuguese sign and spoken languages
Prosody and head gestures as markers of information status in French as a native and foreign language
Temporal relationships between speech and hand gestures in the vicinity of potential turn boundaries in German and Swedish conversation
Do hand gestures increase perceived prominence in naturally produced utterances
Gesture, prosodic prominence and stresslessness in Indonesian
From co-speech actions to co-speech gestures? Effects of visibility and information structure on cross-modal synchronization
The Oxford Handbook of Language Prosody
Visual channel facilitates the comprehension of the intonation of Brazilian Portuguese wh-questions and wh-exclamations
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |