Preschoolers Mark Focus Types Through Multimodal Prominence
Further Evidence for the Precursor Role of Gestures
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5900410 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sara Coego (0000-0002-6322-3039), Núria Esteve‐gibert (0000-0003-2408-5849), Pilar Prieto (0000-0001-8175-1081, Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), 08010 Barcelona, Spain) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue | 5 |
| Pages | 92 |
| Publication date | 2025-04-26 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Languages (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2226-471X • E-ISSN: 2226-471X |
| Publisher | MDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT) |
| DOI | 10.3390/languages10050092 |
| OpenAlex | W4410069249 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 65 |
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 for all three measures. The results indicated, first, that children's prosodic and gestural behavior was key in marking corrective focus. A significant tendency to use more gestures and increase both prosodic and gestural prominence was found in the corrective focus condition across the three age groups. Second, a developmental difference emerged in the acquisition of contrastive focus. Three-year-olds relied solely on gesture presence to encode contrastive focus, being unable to differentiate it prosodically from information focus. In turn, four- and five-year-olds used both gestures and prosody, with contrastive focus not only receiving more gestures than information focus but also increased prosodic prominence. This finding shows that gesture presence is a precursor to prosodic prominence in marking contrastive focus in Catalan, thus supporting the idea that gesture production can bootstrap the expression of focus type distinctions
Focus (optics · Gesture · Linguistics · Physics · Computer Science · Digital Communication and Language · Hearing Impairment and Communication · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Psychology · Communication · Philosophy
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| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2026 - 2026 (1) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |