Prosodic and gestural cues to meaning in developmental language disorder
Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This doctoral thesis investigates how prosodic and gestural cues support language processing in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) compared to typically developing peers. Through three eye-tracking experiments with Catalan-speaking children aged 5–10, it examines how multimodal input aids the comprehension of structural and pragmatic meanings and how memory capacities modulate this use. Study 1 shows that prosody facilitates the resolution of syntactic ambiguities, whereas gestures do not enhance comprehension. Study 2 reveals that gestures provide compensatory support for pragmatic inference, especially in indirect requests. Study 3 demonstrates that verbal and visuospatial memory predict individual differences in the integration of multimodal cues. Overall, the results show that prosody serves as a reliable linguistic cue, while gesture plays a compensatory role when processing demands increase. These findings refine models of multimodal communication and have implications for language intervention in children with DLD.
Author: Giberga, Albert
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7134095100
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