Prosody and gesture in the comprehension of pragmatic meanings: the case of children with Developmental Language Disorder

Prosodic cues facilitate children’s understanding of pragmatic meanings. Multimodal prosody (i.e., combining prosody with body movements) provides enhancing cues to pragmatic comprehension and could be beneficial for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). The present study evaluated 45...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Giberga, Albert, Ahufinger, Nadia, Igualada, Alfonso, Aguilera, Mari, Guerra, Ernesto, Esteve-Gibert, Núria
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2024
País:España
Institución:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositorio:O2, repositorio institucional de la UOC
OAI Identifier:oai:openaccess.uoc.edu:10609/153306
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/10609/153306
http://doi.org/10.21437/SpeechProsody.2024-141
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:developmental language disorder
prosody
gestures
pragmatic development
Descripción
Sumario:Prosodic cues facilitate children’s understanding of pragmatic meanings. Multimodal prosody (i.e., combining prosody with body movements) provides enhancing cues to pragmatic comprehension and could be beneficial for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). The present study evaluated 45 Typically Developing children (TD) and 34 children with DLD in their ability to infer pragmatic meanings through prosody and gestures in a visual-world eye-tracking task. Pragmatic intent (interrogativity, indirect requests), and Experimental condition (prosody-enhanced, multimodallyenhanced, non-enhanced) were presented within-participants. Offline results revealed that prosody enhanced comprehension of the target meanings across groups, that younger children with DLD are less accurate in general, and that multimodal cues especially help older children with DLD in complex meanings (indirect requests). Eye-tracking results showed faster and more accurate processing by older TD children over the other subgroups and no patterns of differences in the processing of multimodality. Overall, we show how prosody and accompanying gestures can help children’s pragmatic comprehension when structural linguistic abilities are compromised.