Prosodic and gestural cues to meaning in developmental language disorder
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 inpu...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2025 |
| País: | España |
| Institución: | Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) |
| Repositorio: | O2, repositorio institucional de la UOC |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:openaccess.uoc.edu:10609/154670 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/10609/154670 |
| Access Level: | acceso embargado |
| Palabra clave: | trastorn del desenvolupament del llenguatge comunicació multimodal registre de moviments oculars capacitats de memoria trastorno del desarrollo del lenguaje comunicación multimodal seguimiento ocular capacidades de memoria developmental language disorder multimodal communication eye-tracking memory capacities |
| Sumario: | 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. |
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