Núria Esteve-Gibert

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

This chapter delves into the crucial role of pronunciation, particularly intonation, in shaping meaning and fostering the development of pragmatics in Spanish as an additional language (ELE). Effective communication not only relies on the literal content of verbal messages, but it also heavily depends on the appropriate use of oral and non-verbal c...

Previous research has shown that prosodic structure can regulate the relationship between co-speech gestures and speech itself. Most co-speech studies have focused on manual gestures, but head movements have also been observed to accompany speech events by Munhall, Jones, Callan, Kuratate, and Vatikiotis-Bateson [(2004). Psychol. Sci. 15(2), 133-13...

Prosodic cues facilitate children’s understanding of pragmatic meanings. Multimodal prosody (i.e., combining prosody with body movements) provides enhancing cues to pragmatic comprehension and could be beneficial for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). The present study evaluated 45 Typically Developing children (TD) and 34 c...

Language includes both auditory and visual cues relevant to language learning. Human communication and interaction rely on the acoustic speech stream produced as well as on language related visual information, most prominently the hands and the mouth and eye regions in the face. Infants and toddlers have been shown to integrate different sensory pe...

A comprehensive approach, including social and emotional affectations, has been recently proposed as an important framework to understand Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). There is an increasing considerable interest in knowing how language and emotion are related, and as far as we know, the role of the emotional regulation (ER) of parents of...

Previous evidence suggests that children's mastery of prosodic modulations to signal the informational status of discourse referents emerges quite late in development. In the present study, we investigate the children's use of head gestures as it compares to prosodic cues to signal a referent as being contrastive relative to a set of possible alter...

Previous research has shown that rhythmic head movement accompanies F0 modulations in speech (Munhall et al., 1994) and that this co-verbal head movement may be linked to prosodic features such as pitch accents and prosodic boundaries (Esteve-Gibert et al., 2017; Hadar et al., 1984; House et al., 2001). In this study, we examined how the production...

Rhythmic, co-verbal movement of the head always accompanies speech (Munhall et al., 1994). Previ- ous work on rhythmic head gestures (head-nods and eyebrow movements) during speech specifically focused on timing and motor organization. These studies suggested that co-verbal head movements are linked to the production of prosodic features of speech...

Previous studies have shown that visual information is a crucial input in early language learning. In the present study we examine what type of visual input helps preschoolers in acquiring nonnative phonological contrasts. Catalan/Spanish-speaking children (4–5 years, N = 47) participated in a task to assess their phonological discrimination abilit...

Gestures can be described in various terms including their form, their relationship to spoken prosody, their semantic relationship with an utterance, or their pragmatic functions (see [1] for a review). However, McNeill's [2] classic descriptive types, with referential categories (iconic, metaphoric and deictic) distinct from a rhythmic category (b...

Expressive moments in communicative hand gesture often align with emphatic stress in speech. It has recently been found that acoustic markers of emphatic stress arise naturally during steady-state phonation when upper-limb movements impart physical impulse on the body, most likely affecting acoustics via respiratory activity. In this confirmatory s...

This study examines how individual pragmatic skills, and more specifically, empathy, influences language processing when a temporary lexical ambiguity can be resolved via intonation. We designed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which participants could anticipate a referent before disambiguating lexical information became available, by inf...

Els estudis sobre desenvolupament del llenguatge típicament s'han centrat en l'anàlisi de la parla. Tanmateix, hi ha altres elements comunicatius que són una peça fonamental en la comunicació i cognició humanes: els gestos. Aquests elements visuals estan íntimament integrats amb la parla des del punt de vista temporal i des del punt de vista semant...

Communicative exchanges require listeners to understand the pragmatic intentions behind the interlocutor’s speech acts, and our skills in inferring others’ social and pragmatic states seem to affect this linguistic understanding. By means of a visual-world eye-tracking task, this study aimed at investigating how individual empathy skills impact the...

A well-known phenomenon of multimodal language is the synchronous coupling of prosodic contours in speech with salient kinematic changes in co-speech hand-gesture motions. Invariably, such coupling has been rendered by psychologists to require a dedicated neural-cognitive mechanism preplanning speech and gesture trajectories. Recently, in a continu...

Previous research shows that infants and children (as well as adults) benefit from audio-visual stimuli when acquiring non-native phonological categories. Yet research on the multimodal nature of language learning has disregarded one type of potential relevant information: tactile input. The present study aims at exploring if tactile lipreading is...

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...

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) a...

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...

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the relationship between prosody, gesture, and spoken language production from a developmental perspective. The coordination of prosody and manual movements from theoretical, behavioral and neuroanatomical perspectives will be explored. We focus on how gesture landmarks coordinate with prosodic prominence f...

This chapter reviews evidence on how infants up to 18 months of age develop the ability to use prosody as a sign of the expression of pragmatic meanings, from both a comprehension and a production point of view. Developmental research reveals that pre-lexical infants use prosodic information not only to comprehend emotions in the speech of their co...

The development of body movements such as hand or head gestures, or facial expressions, seems to go hand-in-hand with the development of speech abilities. We know that very young infants rely on the movements of their caregivers’ mouth to segment the speech stream, that infants’ canonical babbling is temporally related to rhythmic hand movements, t...

Speakers use different strategies in different languages to signal which element in the discourse is particularly informative for the interlocutor, a phenomenon called ‘information focus’. One of the most frequent strategies to achieve this across languages is by prosodic means. In French, for instance, speakers are found to compress the pitch rang...

Previous studies have suggested that French listeners experience difficulties when they have to discriminate between words that differ in stress. A limitation is that these studies used stress patterns that do not respect the rules of stress placement in French. In this study, three stress patterns were tested on bisyllabic words (1) the legal stre...

This study examines the influence of the position of prosodic heads (accented syllables) and prosodic edges (prosodic word and intonational phrase boundaries) on the timing of head movements. Gesture movements and prosodic events tend to be temporally aligned in the discourse, the most prominent part of gestures typically being aligned with prosodi...

This study investigates how pre-school French children make use of prosodic and gesture cues to produce sentences in broad focus and narrow (contrastive and corrective) focus conditions. Children’s ability to use prosody for signalling the information status of discourse elements is not mastered until late in development. English-, German-, or Dutc...

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 pot...

The pragmatic meaning evoked by intonation is known to be processed online by listeners, but less is understood about which part of the contour triggers the meaning interpretation and how individual pragmatic abilities impact intonational processing. Here we investigate the role of empathy skills on the stability and timing of the intonation-meanin...

Listeners rapidly process tonal composition and pitch accent placement within an utterance to create expectations about its pragmatic meaning and information structure. It is still unknown whether the nuclear pitch accent alone or a combination of pitch accent and the following edge tone are needed in order to process intonational meaning in French...

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 ac...

This research explores children’s ability to integrate contextual and linguistic cues. Prior work has shown that children are not able to weigh contextual information in an adult-like way and that between the age of 4 and 6 they show difficulties in revising a hypothesis they have made based on early-arriving linguistic information in sentence proc...

This research explores children’s ability to integrate contextual and linguistic cues. Prior work has shown that children are not able to weight contextual information in an adult-like way (Weighall 2008) and that between the age of 4 and 6 they show difficulties in revising a hypothesis they have made based on early-arriving linguistic information...

Intonational Grammar in Ibero-Romance: Approaches across linguistic subfields is a volume of empirical research papers incorporating recent theoretical, methodological, and interdisciplinary advances in the field of intonation, as they relate to the Ibero-Romance languages. The volume brings together leading experts in Catalan, Portuguese, and Span...

Previous literature had found that infants rely on the social-contextual information to understand the pragmatic meaning of a pointing gesture. Our study investigates the prosodic and gesture features accompanying a pointing gesture that infants may also use to infer its meaning. Nine caregiver-infant dyads played three games designed to elicit poi...

In conversation speakers accompany speech with simple hand and body motions that are typically aligned with prosodic heads and edges. These beat gestures have been shown to be strongly correlated in speech with the presence of acoustic cues of prominence (Krahmer & Swerts, 2007) and to have similar functions as prosody, e.g. information highlightin...

This study investigated the sensitivity of 9-month-old infants to the alignment between prosodic and gesture prominences in pointing–speech combinations. Results revealed that the perception of prominence is multimodal and that infants are aware of the timing of gesture–speech combinations well before they can produce them.

This study explores the temporal coordination between gesture and speech by addressing two main questions: (1) Are speakers sensitive to the misalignment between gesture prominence and prosodic prominence? (2) Is this sensitivity modulated by the semantic information conveyed by gesture and speech modalities in production? Experiment 1 tested quest...

In this study, we examine how 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old Catalanacquiring children are able to make use of audio (intonational) and visual (facial gesture) modalities in the comprehension of speaker disbelief, as well as the role of the child's developing Theory of Mind. Our results suggest that in this case, facial gesture provides children with scaff...

There is an increasing consensus to regard gesture and speech as parts of an integrated communication system, in part because of the findings related to their temporal coordination at different levels. In general, results for different types of gestures show that the most prominent part of the gesture (the apex) is typically aligned with accented s...

Speakers often use simple hand and body motions to accompany speech and that are typically aligned with prosodic. Beat gestures are strongly correlated in speech with the presence of prosodic acoustic cues of prominence (Krahmer & Swerts, 2007). In fact, beat gestures are found to have similar functions as prosody, i.e. information highlighting (Lo...

This study explores the patterns of gesture and speech combinations from the babbling period to the one-word stage and the temporal alignment between the two modalities. The communicative acts of four Catalan children at 0;11, 1;1, 1;3, 1;5, and 1;7 were gesturally and acoustically analyzed. Results from the analysis of a total of 4,507 communicati...

This study explores the patterns of gesture and speech combinations from the babbling period to the one-word stage and the temporal alignment between the two modalities. The communicative acts of four Catalan children at 0;11, 1;1, 1;3, 1;5, and 1;7 were gesturally and acoustically analyzed. Results from the analysis of a total of 4,507 communicati...

Purpose Previous work on the temporal coordination between gesture and speech found that the prominence in gesture coordinates with speech prominence. In this study, the authors investigated the anchoring regions in speech and pointing gesture that align with each other. The authors hypothesized that (a) in contrastive focus conditions, the gesture...

ABSTRACT 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 vocaliza...