The Role of Prosody and Gestures in the Acquisition of Pragmatics: Typical and Atypical Populations

Financiador: MINISTERIO DE CIENCIA, INNOVACIÓN Y UNIVERSIDADES

Convocatoria: Proyectos I+D+i 2020 - Modalidades "Retos Investigación" y "Generación de Conocimiento" (MINISTERIO DE CIENCIA, INNOVACIÓN Y UNIVERSIDADES)

De ámbito Nacional.

The main aim of PROGESPRAG is two-fold: (a) to investigate how linguistic prosody and body movements contribute to young children interpretation of pragmatic meanings, and (b) to examine if these mechanisms can be used by child populations with various linguistic, communicative, pragmatic, and socio-cognitive skills, to overcome their deficits and ultimately access linguistic meaning. The comprehension of pragmatic meanings will be evaluated in three populations, each population targeted in a distinct axis of the project: in axis 1, typically-developing children (TD), which are expected to develop pragmatic skills in conjunction with other linguistic dimensions; in axis 2, children with developmental language disorders (DLD), which have processing and grammatical deficits that impact their linguistic abilities; and in axis 3, children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), which have primary socio-cognitive deficits that impact their pragmatics comprehension. In each axis all children will take part in 4 experiments using the visual-world eye-tracking paradigm to tap into the children’s online processing of prosody and body movements in the comprehension of literal illocutionary acts (Exp.1), nonliteral pragmatic inferences (Exp.2), the structuring of information in the discourse through focus (Exp.3a), and the structuring of information in the discourse through phrasing (Exp.3b). This project will significantly impact the fields of language acquisition, pragmatics, prosodic phonology, gesture studies, and language and communication disorders, and will also help advance our understanding of how neurodevelopmental disorders such as DLD and ASD should be evaluated and treated, and of how linguistic and communicative skills could be boosted in children with typical and atypical development.