Research projects

Multimodality and narrative and pragmatic abilities

The project of my PhD thesis aims to analyze the role that multimodality plays in the narrative and pragmatic development typically developing children and of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). For the thesis, we will be carrying out different studies:

The outcome of these studies will highlight the role of multimodality in development and its effects for promoting the development of oral narrative and pragmatic abilities.

In collaboration with:

Project supported by the Education Department (Generalitat de Catalunya)

Related research:

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Improving Catalan use and Catalan phonology in preschoolers 

The goal of this project is to determine whether the MultiModal Narrative (MMN) intervention can also help boost the use of Catalan language and improve Catalan phonology of Spanish-dominant preschoolers.

In collaboration with:

The development of gesture, speech and information structure 

This project is concerned about children's multimodal development, specifically on the temporal relationship between gesture and prosodic prominence and on how children use gesture to mark information structure in discourse. 

In collaboration with:

Main findings:

Related research:

* Shared first authorship

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Annotation of multimodal corpora

The team has developed the MultiModal MultiDimensional (M3D) labeling scheme for the annotation of multimodal corpora, which offers a dimensionalized approach to the annotation of communicative body movements (i.e., manual gestures, head movements, and other articulators) in terms of their form, their semantic and pragmatic contributions to speech, and their relationship to speech prosody.

In collaboration with:

Related research:

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The predictive role of pragmatic skills on language development

This longitudinal project's aim is to analyze whether early expressive pragmatic skills at 3-4 years of age can be predictive of later linguistic skills at 5-6.

In collaboration with:

Related research: