Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Pilar Prieto Vives is an ICREA Research Professor at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Catalunya. After obtaining her doctoral degree in Romance Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Bell Laboratories (Murray Hill, New Jersey), where she continued working on the linguistic meaning of prosody across languages. Since 2008 she coordinates the "Prosodic Studies and Gesture Group" at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Her research examines the role of multimodality (e.g, the use of prosody and co-speech gestures) in human communication from crosslinguistic, developmental, and learning perspectives. Her work contributes to multisensory models of language and informs evidence-based educational and clinical interventions to improve language skills.
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Prosody Across Senses: Testing a Reconceptualization of Prosody as a Modality-Neutral Component of Language Governing Spoken, Visual, and Tactile Signals
Prosody is traditionally regarded as a property of speech, whereby prominence and grouping patterns are conveyed through acoustic cues such as pitch, duration, and intensity. However, prosodic events in communication often co-occur with visual signals, including facial expressions, head movements, and hand gestures, and may also be expressed through tactile interactions. This raises a fundamental question: Is prosody inherently tied to speech, or does it constitute a modality-neutral component of language that can be realized across different sensory channels?
In this talk, I will present the theoretical foundations of a modality-neutral conception of prosody (Prieto et al 2024), and review converging evidence from spoken language, gesture studies, sign language and tactile sign language research. I will argue that prominence and grouping—the two core functions traditionally associated with prosody—are expressed through a range of acoustic, visual, and tactile cues that share similar communicative functions across language modalities (spoken, sign, and tactile sign languages). This evidence suggests that prosody may be better understood as a sensory-independent component of language that flexibly recruits available communicative resources rather than as a phenomenon confined to speech.
Building on this proposal, I will introduce the PROSODY-SENSES project, which aims to empirically test the modality-neutral hypothesis in future research. The project will investigate how spoken, visual, and tactile signals contribute to the expression of prosodic structure across typologically diverse spoken languages, sign languages, and tactile sign languages used by deafblind individuals. By examining the extent to which prosodic functions are preserved across sensory channels, the project seeks to advance a more inclusive and multisensory understanding of human language and communication.