About Me
I am a "Juan de la Cierva-Formación" postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Dept. of Specific Didactics (Faculty of Education and Psychology), at the Universitat de Girona. I am a research member of the GRECA (Institut de Recerca Educativa) at the Universitat de Girona and of the Prosodic Studies Group (GrEP) at the 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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Click here to see my most recent CV
POSITIVE ASSESSMENTS:
Tenure-eligible lecturer ("Professorat lector"), since 2021 by Agència per a la Qualitat del Sistema Universitari de Catalunya (AQU).
Latest news:
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.
03-2023: The Special Issue Reprint “Language Development in Children: Description to Detect and Prevent Language Difficulties” we have contributed to has been published online and is freely accessible on the MDPI Books platform.
12-2022: Our study "Multimodal development in children's narrative speech: Evidence for tight gesture-speech temporal alignment patterns as early as 5 years old," first authored by Júlia Florit-Pons and in collaboration with Dr. Patrick L. Rohrer and Dr. Pilar Prieto has been accepted for publication at the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.
07-2022: I've been granted the Juan de la Cierva-Formación postdoctoral research fellowship from the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Agencia Estatal de Investigación, Unión Europea NextGenerationEU, Plan de Reuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia.
07-2022: I've been awarded the Extraordinary Doctorate Award for my PhD thesis entitled Non-referential beat gestures as a window onto the development of children's narrative abilities! Check the PhD thesis here. (UPF news).
06-2022: The audiovisual corpus of Catalan children's narrative discourse development, one of the outcomes of my PhD thesis, is now available for open access at the OSF! Check the corpus here.