Pilar Prieto

University Pompeu Fabra | UPF · Department of Translation and Language Sciences

The ability to imitate speech is linked to individual cognitive abilities such as working memory and the auditory processing of music. However, little research has focused on the role of specific components of musical perception aptitude in relation to an individual's native language from a crosslinguistic perspective. This study explores the predi...

Practicing public speaking to simulated audiences created in virtual reality environments is reported to be effective for reducing public speaking anxiety. However, little is known about whether this effect can be enhanced by encouraging the use of gestures during VR-assisted public speaking training. In the present study two groups of secondary sc...

This study explores the effects of embodied prosodic training on the production of non-native French front rounded vowels (i.e. /y, ø, oe/) and the overall pronunciation proficiency. Fifty-seven Catalan learners of French practiced pronunciation in one of two conditions: one group observed hand gestures embodying prosodic features of the sentences...

Research has shown a close temporal relationship between prominence-lending tonal movements in speech and prominence in manual gesture. However, prosodic structure consists of not only prosodic heads (i.e., pitch accentuation) but also prosodic edges. To our knowledge, no previous studies have assessed the value of prosodic edges (nuclear vs. phras...

The present study assesses the effect of a three-session classroom-based training program involving singing songs with familiar melodies on second-language pronunciation and vocabulary learning. Ninety-five adolescent Chinese ESL learners (M = 14.04 years) were assigned to one of two groups. Participants learned the lyrics in English of three songs...

This study aims to investigate whether hand gestures mimicking the lip aperture of non-native vowels can improve learners' production accuracy after audiovisual perceptual phonetic training. Sixty-six Catalan/Spanish bilingual learners of English were randomly assigned to either the NoGesture or Gesture group for training on the challenging English...

This study assessed whether visuospatial working memory (VSWM) can predict L2 perceptual learning through audiovisual phonetic training with or without hand gestures. Ninety-nine Catalan speakers were trained on the perception of English vowel pairs /ae-ʌ/ and /i-ɪ/ under one of the following three conditions: training without gestures, with hand g...

Multimodal communication research focuses on how different means of signalling coordinate to communicate effectively. This line of research is traditionally influenced by fields such as cognitive and neuroscience, human-computer interaction, and linguistics. With new technologies becoming available in fields such as natural language processing and...

Purpose This study aims to analyze the development of gesture–speech temporal alignment patterns in children's narrative speech from a longitudinal perspective and, specifically, the potential differences between different gesture types, namely, gestures that imagistically portray or refer to semantic content in speech (i.e., referential gestures)...

Purpose: Though the frequency of gesture use by infants has been related to the development of different language abilities in the initial stages of language acquisition, less is known about whether this frequency (or "gesture rate") continues to correlate with language measures in later stages of language acquisition, or whether the relation to l...

The present study investigates whether training second language pronunciation with tactile cues facilitates the production of non-native sounds involving accessible articulatory features. In a between-subjects experiment with a pretest-training-posttest design, 50 Turkish learners of English received audiovisual training on a set of target words an...

En els últims anys, l’ús de la música a les aules de llengua estrangera s’ha normalitzat i els docents empren sovint activitats lúdiques com ara l’audició de cançons per aprendre nou vocabulari o noves estructures gramaticals. Tanmateix, l’ús de la música sol ser percebut per part dels docents com un recurs merament motivador i lúdic, que s’inserei...

Recent cross-linguistic research has demonstrated that speakers use a prosodic mitigation strategy when addressing higher status interlocutors by talking more slowly, reducing the intensity and lowering the overall fundamental frequency (F0). Much less is known, however, about how politeness-related meaning is expressed multimodally (i.e., combinin...

This presentation was designed and conducted for an audience of teachers of English as a foreign language. It presents the state of the art regarding the empirically-tested effects of embodied training techniques on pronunciation. The presentation is free to watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu0avyZfx58

Public speaking is fundamental in our daily life, and it happens to be challenging for many people. Like all aspects of language, these skills should be encouraged early on in educational settings. However, the high number of students per class and the extensive curriculum both limit the possibilities of the training and, moreover, entail that stud...

Pragmatics lies at the point where language meets the social world and encompasses both the linguistic and the social dimensions of communication. However, the relationship between pragmatic abilities, other language skills, and socio-cognitive aspects such as mentalizing is still a matter of wide debate. This study sets out to investigate the stat...

Musical perception skills have been shown to influence second language speech production. Likewise, working memory may also affect nonnative speech production abilities. However, very few studies have assessed their respective role in speech imitation abilities. The present study thus investigates the predictive role of musical perception skills an...

Research on prosodic development has mostly focused on infants' skills, and there is much less research on preschool and older children's prosodic abilities and in particular on the advanced pragmatic uses of prosody (i.e., pragmatic prosody). The present cross-sectional study assesses children's expressive pragmatic prosody profiles in three devel...

Bien qu’il ne soit aujourd’hui plus question de « supprimer » l’accent étranger d’un apprenant (Derwing & Munro, 2009), des recherches ont montré que tant les erreurs segmentales (Isaacs & Trofimovich, 2012) que les erreurs suprasegmentales (Derwin et al., 1998) influencent les évaluations de compréhensibilité et de fluence des apprenants. Par cons...

Training L2 suprasegmental features benefits pronunciation accuracy and comprehensibility, especially through the use of hand gestures. However, studies have mainly looked at the effect of prosodic training in controlled tasks and less is known about spontaneous speech. The present study explores the effect of prosodic training with and without ges...

Research shows that musical expertise benefits second language (L2) phonological learning [1], however little is known on the potential effects of training musical melodic and rhythmic skills on language production skills. This study investigated the role of training musical features such as melody, rhythm, and accent with embodied activities [2] (...

Public speaking is essential in our daily life. However, standing in front of a crowd is more often than not challenging for people. VR simulations can help speakers meet this challenge. Our study employed a between-subjects design with a VR group (N=17) and a Non-VR group (N=14). Both groups gave a 2-minute speech in front of a live audience befor...

With increasing evidence in favour of embodied learning techniques, more research is needed to explore eventual applications in the field of second language acquisition, for example, the effect of embodied training on phonological learning. This study investigated how pronunciation was affected by visuospatial hand gestures depicting speech rhythm...

While recent studies have claimed that non-referential gestures (i.e., gestures that do not visually represent any semantic content in speech) are used to mark discourse-new and/or-accessible referents and focused information in adult speech, to our knowledge, no prior investigation has studied the relationship between information structure (IS) an...

Over recent decades much research has analyzed the relevance of 9- to 20- month-old infants’ early imitation skills (object- and language-based imitation) for language development. Yet there have been few systematic comparisons of the joint relevance of these imitative behaviors later on in development. This correlational study investigated whether...

The widely cited frequency code hypothesis attempts to explain a diverse range of communicative phenomena through the acoustic projection of body size. The set of phenomena includes size sound symbolism (using /i/ to signal smallness in words such as teeny ), intonational phonology (using rising contours to signal questions) and the indexing of soc...

Research on gesture production has emphasized the strong relationship between speech and gesture. Studies have explored whether the inability to gesture is detrimental to speech at different levels. However, findings are still inconclusive and research that focuses on a complete set of acoustic prosodic measures, including F0 and intensity are lack...

While it is well known that prosodic features are central in the conveyance of pragmatic meaning across languages, developmental research has assessed a narrow set of pragmatic functions of prosody. Research on prosodic development has focused on early infancy, with the subsequent preschool ages and beyond having received less attention. This study...

This study investigates the impact of embodied training of pronunciation with visuospatial hand gestures cueing Mandarin aspirated plosives. Sixty-seven Catalan participants learned to pronounce and memorised novel Mandarin words containing non-native aspirated plosives with or without performing hand gestures. They were tested on perception, produ...

A longitudinal study with 45 children (Hispanic, 13%; non-Hispanic, 87%) investigated whether the early production of non-referential beat and flip gestures, as opposed to referential iconic gestures, in parent-child naturalistic interactions from 14 to 58 months old predicts narrative abilities at age 5. Results revealed that only non-referential...

Speakers produce both referential gestures, which depict properties of a referent, and non-referential gestures, which lack semantic content. While a large number of studies have demonstrated the cognitive and linguistic benefits of referential gestures as well as their precursor and predictive role in both typically developing (TD) and non-TD chil...

This study tested the effects of hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned French words on the pronunciation of these words by 7-to 8-year-old Catalan children. In a short training experiment with a pre-and posttest design, 28 children either repeated cognate words in French (e.g. French aspirateur, Catalan aspirador 'vacuum cleaner') while clap...

The present study explored whether listening to songs and singing can improve second language pronunciation and vocabulary learning at beginning stages of language acquisition. One hundred and eight Chinese students underwent a 4‐min training session to learn 14 words from a meaningful French song about the parts of the body in either one of two co...

For years, linguists have noted that intonation patterns and discourse markers encode similar pragmatic meanings across languages. The present study investigates whether a functional compensatory distribution can be documented across languages by focusing on the expression of epistemic commitment in two Romance languages which have been reported to...

This study investigates the effectiveness of training preschoolers in order to enhance their social cognition and pragmatic skills. Eighty-three 3–4-year-olds were divided into three groups and listened to stories enriched with mental state terms. Then, whereas the control group engaged in non-reflective activities, the two experimental groups were...

The prosodic systems of Basque, Catalan, Portuguese, and Spanish have recently yielded a great deal of detailed work that has contributed to comprehensive descriptions of the different languages and language varieties. Taking a comparative stance, as in Frota and Prieto (2015b) for three Romance languages and Elordieta and Hualde (2014) for Basque,...

Purpose Research has shown that observing hand gestures mimicking pitch movements or rhythmic patterns can improve the learning of second language (L2) suprasegmental features. However, less is known about the effects of hand gestures on the learning of novel phonemic contrasts. This study examines (a) whether hand gestures mimicking phonetic featu...

Previous work has shown how native listeners benefit from observing iconic gestures during speech comprehension tasks of both degraded and non-degraded speech. By contrast, effects of the use of gestures in non-native listener populations are less clear and studies have mostly involved iconic gestures. The current study aims to complement these fin...

Gestures are harbingers of children's linguistic steps. Further in development, evidence has demonstrated that using iconic character-viewpoint gestures when performing more complex linguistic discourses (e.g., narratives) can predict better-structured, complete goal-based stories. However, previous studies have not assessed and compared the develo...

While recent studies have shown a relationship between rhythmic perceptual abilities and second language pronunciation talent, less is known about the effects of rhythmic production abilities. This study investigates whether accurately performing hand-clapping has an effect on foreign language imitation ability. Participants were 25 Chinese adolesc...

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...

This paper compares the results of two complementary experiments exploring the effects of training with gesture observation (Experiment 1) and gesture production (Experiment 2) on L2 pronunciation learning. Importantly, this study controls for the appropriateness of the gestures performed by learners during the production training and its effect on...

Children from 5 to 6 years of age have been shown to start producing non-referential beat gestures in narrative speech. However, it still remains unclear how the use of these non-referential gestures along with referential iconic gestures evolves over time in children’s narrative discourse, and how the temporal integration between gestures and pros...

This study investigates the effects of simultaneously performing hand gestures on the accuracy of pronunciation during L2 speech imitation focusing on the appropriateness of gesture performance. Fifty-five Catalan-speakers without any knowledge of Mandarin imitated Mandarin words contrasting only in aspiration. The target words containing the aspir...

Gesture is an integral part of language development. While recent evidence shows that observing a speaker who is simultaneously producing beat gestures helps preschoolers remember and understand information and also improves the production of oral narratives, little is known about the potential value of encouraging children to produce beat gestures...

Despite the evidence that infants are sensitive to facial cues and prosody for the detection of emotion, we have contradictory evidence regarding the use of these cues by older preschool and school children when inferring both emotional and politeness stance. This study assessed preschool aged children’s sensitivity to intonational and facial cues...

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...

Previous work has shown the positive effect of encouraging gestures in performing various tasks; in these studies, the participants generally appeared to gesture more when explicitly asked to do it. However, little attention has been paid to whether encouraging gestures also affects other gesture features, i.e., gesture type and salience. In this p...

Purpose Previous studies have investigated the effects of the inability to produce hand gestures on speakers' prosodic features of speech; however, the potential effects of encouraging speakers to gesture have received less attention, especially in naturalistic settings. This study aims at investigating the effects of encouraging the production of...

Children achieve their first language milestones initially in gesture and prosody before they do so in speech. However, little is known about the potential precursor role of those features later in development when children start using more complex linguistic skills. In this study, we explore how children’s ability to reflect on their degree of unc...

Poster presented in Melbourne

While several studies have investigated the temporal relationship between co-speech gestures and prosodic structure, little is known about their potential interaction at the level of their encoding of pragmatic meaning. Here we report the results of two complementary intonation-gesture matching tasks which investigate the potential co-dependencies...

Children might combine gesture and prosody to express a pragmatic meaning such as a request, information focus, uncertainty or politeness, before they can convey these meanings in speech. However, little is known about the developmental trajectories of gestural and prosodic patterns and how they relate to a child's growing understanding and proposi...

Gesture and prosody are considered to be important precursors in early language development. In the present study, we ask whether those cues play a similar role later in children's acquisition of more complex pragmatic skills, such as politeness. 64 three- to five-year-old Catalan-dominant children participated in a request production task in four...

Recent studies on the learning of L2 prosody have suggested that pitch gestures can enhance the learning of the L2 lexical tones. Yet it remains unclear whether the use of these gestures can aid the learning of L2 intonation, especially by tonal-language speakers. Sixty-four Mandarin speakers with basic-level Spanish were asked to learn three Spani...

This study examines the acquisition process of speech rhythm in Dutch learners of Spanish (DLS) and Spanish learners of Dutch (SLD) at different proficiency levels to determine whether learning direction affects the success of rhythm acquisition in a foreign language (L2). Analyses of lengthening effects showed that the two learner groups followed...

Iconic and pointing gestures are important precursors of children’s early language and cognitive development. While beat gestures seem to have positive effects on the recall of information by preschoolers, little is known about the potential beneficial effects of observing beat gestures on the development of children’s narrative performance. We tes...

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...

Though research has shown that rhythmic training is beneficial for phonological speech processing, little empirical work has been carried out to assess whether rhythmic training in the classroom can help to improve pronunciation in a second language. This study tests the potential benefits of hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned French word...

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...

This study investigates the perception and production of a specific type of metaphoric gesture that mimics melody in speech, also called pitch gesture , in the learning of L2 suprasegmental features. In a between-subjects design, a total of 106 participants with no previous knowledge of Chinese were asked to observe (Experiment 1) and produce (Expe...

Previous research has shown that rhythmic training enhances phonological speech processing, yet little is known about whether rhythmic training can also help to improve pronunciation in a second language. This study tests the potential benefits of hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned French words for the acquisition of pronunciation pattern...

The aim of this study is to assess whether a brief training with rhythmic beat gestures helps L2 pronunciation in a reading aloud task with high school students. In a between-subjects pretest-posttest design, a total of 59 high school students were randomly assigned to one of the following two conditions: the beat gesture group and no-beat gesture...