About Me
I am Assistant Professor at the Department of Specific Didactics (Faculty of Education and Psychology), at the Universitat de Girona. Previously, I was a "Margarita Salas" (2022; through a call from Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and "Juan de la Cierva-Formación" (2023) postdoctoral researcher both at the Faculty of Education and Psychology at the Universitat de Girona.
I am a research member of the Comparative Minds Research Group (Faculty of Education and Psychology, Universitat de Girona) and of the Prosodic and Gestural Studies Group (GrEPG)(Universitat Pompeu Fabra). My main line of research focuses on the multimodal integration of gesture and speech prosody, and its significant role in children's language learning and development, particularly in their oral linguistic abilities. Broadly speaking, I am interested in how multimodal communication supports teaching-learning processes, and in particular the development of cognitive and oral linguistic abilities in children.
Education:
2016-2020: PhD in Language Sciences, International Mention (Dept. of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra), under the supervision of Dr. Pilar Prieto (ICREA-UPF).
2015-2016: MA in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics (Dept. of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra).
2014-2015: MA in Teacher Training (Universitat de Barcelona), specializing in Catalan Language and Literature.
2010-2014: BA in Catalan Language and Literature (Dept. of Philology and Communication, Universitat de Girona)
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Latest news:
09-2025: Our two new studies—“Multimodal language adaptations in child-directed storytelling: How teachers use gestures to shape narratives for young learners” and “Shaping arguments with gestures: The impact of non-referential gesture production and observation on children's argumentative skills”—will be presented at the XI International Congress on Language Acquisition and III Congreso de la Asociación Hispanohablante para el Estudio del Trastorno del Lenguaje.
07-2025: Our two new studies—“Exploring the Impact of Character Viewpoint Gestures on Narrative Recall, Comprehension, and the Perception of Emotion and Engagement in Adults” (part of the symposium Exploring the Cognitive and Emotional Functions of Co-speech Gesture, organized by Dr. Spencer Kelly, Colgate University), and “Explaining with hands: The influence of observing versus producing non-referential gestures on children's argumentative abilities”—will be presented at the 10th Conference of the International Society for Gesture Studies.
06-2025: Our study "Multidimensional Labeling of Gesture in Communication: the M3D Proposal" first authored by Dr. Patrick L. Rohrer has been published in the journal Corpus Pragmatics (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41701-025-00197-2).
03-2025: Our study "Multimodal adaptations in storytelling: Differences in gesture and speech between child-Directed and adult-directed narratives" will be presented at the Multimodal Language: Theoretical Perspectives and Research Methods workshop.
06-2024: In July, two studies "Children's multimodal development: Insights from a corpus of Catalan narrative speech" and "The link between fluent gesture rate, vocabulary and narrative skills in 7- to 9-year-old children" will be presented at the XVIth International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Prague.
05-2023: Our new study "Narrative structure scores in 7- to 9-year-old children are positively linked to fluent referential iconic gesture use and vocabulary knowledge" has been accepted for oral presentation at the 8th Gesture and Speech in Interaction (GESPIN) conference at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
04-2023: Check out our opinion article published in El diari de l'educació: Vilà-Giménez, I., Florit-Pons, J., Igualada, A., & Prieto, P. (2023, April 28). Cal potenciar que els infants aprenguin a expressar-se amb el cos i no només amb les paraules. El diari de l’educació.