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:
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, our 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.
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 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).