Pilar Prieto is an ICREA Research Professor at the Department of Translation and Language Sciences at UPF (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.
Research interests
The primary aim of my research is to elucidate the role of multimodality (e.g, the use of prosody and co-speech gestures) in human communication from crosslinguistic, developmental, and learning perspectives. This investigation is structured around two principal strands: first, to empirically analyze how individuals process and produce prosodic and gestural patterns alongside speech, with the objective of enhancing multisensory and multimodal models of human language; and second, to explore the developmental and learning benefits of prosody and gesture across various domains, including first and second language acquisition. The research holds significant social relevance, as it supports the integration of multimodal training methodologies into evidence-based educational and clinical interventions designed to improve language skills
Selected publications
- Florit-Pons J, Igualada A & Prieto P 2025 'Evaluating the Feasibility and Preliminary Effectiveness of a Multi-Tiered Multimodal Narrative Intervention Program for Preschool Children'Language Speech and Hearing Services in Schools, 56(1), 1-25.
- Esteve-Gibert N, Shattuck-Hufnagel S & Prieto P 2025. 'How a modality-neutral prosodic dimension can enrich the multimodal language acquisition framework: A commentary on Karadöller, Sümer and Özyürek'. 'First Language', 45(6), 732-737.
- Coego S, Esteve-Gibert N & Prieto P 2025, 'Preschoolers Mark Focus Types Through Multimodal Prominence: Further Evidence for the Precursor Role of Gestures', Languages, 10(5), 92.
- Rohrer PL, Tütüncübasi U, Florit-Pons J, Vilà-Giménez I, Esteve-Gibert N, Ren-Mitchell A, Shattuck-Hufnagel S & Prieto P 2025, 'Multidimensional labeling of gesture in communication: the M3D proposal', Corpus Pragmatics, 9, 411-433.
- Florit-Pons J Pronina M Igualada A Prieto P Norbury C, 2025 'Multimodal skills, but not motor skills, predict narrative and expressive pragmatic abilities in children with typical development and neurodevelopmental disorders' Child Development, 96(5), 1807–1824.
- Llompart M, Gorba C & Prieto P 2025, 'Revisiting the link between second-language sound identification and word recognition with an eye on methodological similarity', Studies in Second Language Acquisition. Published online: 1-13.
- Yao T, Xi XT & Prieto P 2025 'The Effects of Oral Narrative Interventions on Second Language Learning: a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis'. System, 134, 103835.
- Pronina M, Feldhausen I & Prieto P 2025, “Prosody and expressivity' In: D. Gutzmann & K. Turgay (Eds). The Oxford Handbook of Expressivity. Chapter 17, 352-372. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Florit-Pons J, Prieto P & Igualada A 2025, 'Co-Creation of a Multi-Tiered Narrative Intervention Program for Speech-Language Pathology and Educational Settings', Am J Speech-Lang Pat., 34 - 6 - 3279 - 3299.