Year: 2014
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This dissertation comprises four experimental studies which investigate the way infants integrate prosody and gesture for intentional communicative purposes. As adult speakers we automatically integrate prosody and gestures at a temporal and pragmatic level, and we use these cues together with social contextual information to convey and understand intentional meanings. My aim is to investigate whether infants use prosodic and gesture features in an integrated way for communicative purposes prior to their use of lexical-semantic cues. The dissertation includes four studies, each one described in a separate chapter. The first study is a longitudinal analysis of how a group of infants produce gesture and speech combinations in natural interactions, with results that show that already at 12 and 15 months of age infants temporally align prosodic and gesture prominences. The second study uses a habituation/test procedure to test the infants‟ early sensitivity to temporal gesture-prosodic integration, showing that 9-month-old infants are sensitive to the alignment between prosodic and gesture prominences. The third study analyzes the longitudinal productions of four infants at the pre-lexical stage and provides evidence that infants use prosodic cues such as pitch range and duration to convey specific intentions like requests, statements, responses, and expressions of satisfaction or discontent. Finally, the fourth study examines how infants responded at 12 months of age to different types of pointing-speech combinations and shows that x infants use prosodic and gestural cues to comprehend communicative intentions behind an attention-directing act. Altogether, this dissertation shows that the temporal integration of gesture and speech occurs at the early stages of language and cognitive development, and that pragmatic uses of prosody and gesture develop before infants master the use of lexical cues. Thus, prosody is the first grammatical component of language that infants use for communicative purposes, revealing that linguistic communication emerges before infants have the ability to use lexical items with semantic meanings. I further claim that infants‟ integration of prosody and gesture at the temporal and pragmatic levels is a reflex of an early emergence of language pragmatics.
Author: Núria Esteve‐Gibert
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2482072331