Preschoolers mark focus types through multimodal prominence: further evidence for the precursor role of gestures

Abstract

The present cross-sectional study assessed the role of multimodal cues in marking focus types during early childhood, focusing on prosodic prominence, gesture presence, and gestural prominence. A total of 116 Catalan-speaking three-, four- and five-year-olds participated in a semi-controlled interactive task eliciting words in three focus conditions: information, contrastive, and corrective. The data were coded manually using holistic assessments for all three measures. The results indicated, first, that children’s prosodic and gestural behavior was key in marking corrective focus. A significant tendency to use more gestures and increase both prosodic and gestural prominence was found in the corrective focus condition across the three age groups. Second, a developmental difference emerged in the acquisition of contrastive focus. Three-year-olds relied solely on gesture presence to encode contrastive focus, being unable to differentiate it prosodically from information focus. In turn, four- and five-year-olds used both gestures and prosody, with contrastive focus not only receiving more gestures than information focus but also increased prosodic prominence. This finding shows that gesture presence is a precursor to prosodic prominence in marking contrastive focus in Catalan, thus supporting the idea that gesture production can bootstrap the expression of focus type distinctions.

This research was funded by grant PID2020-115385GA-I00, financed by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), by the European Union. It was also supported by the grant AGAUR-FI Joan Oró 2025FI_B 00342, funded by the Agency for Management of University and Research Grants (Generalitat de Catalunya) together with the European Social Fund (ESF), by the European Union. The APC was funded by grants PID2021-123823NB-I00 and PID2020-115385GA-I00, financed by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), by the European Union.