Proyectos de generación de conocimiento 2021; Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación / Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation; ref.: PID2021-123823NB-I00.

The main goal of MCOM is to fully integrate prosodic and body signals as sister systems that convey conventional pragmatic meanings into formal and developmental models of language. The first strand of the project documents the integrated patterns of prosodic and gestural meaning. Because one of the major roadblocks in the field is the lack of an integrated transcription system for annotating prosodic and visual signals and their pragmatic effects, a major goal of the project is the development of a multimodal labeling system (M3D) which has a focus on the labelling of the pragmatic features of prosody and gesture. The second strand of the project assesses the integrated patterns of prosodic and gestural development and their predictive value in pragmatic and narrative development in children. The third strand of MCOM has a more applied angle and haa a direct impact on the educational and clinical disciplines. The proposed multimodal interventions assess the value of multimodality on the improvement of several areas of language development, as well as clinical populations including both adults and children. MCOM is thus an interdisciplinary research project which will promote the full integration of prosodic and body signals into the scientific study of linguistic pragmatics as a critical step towards fostering cognitively- inspired and multimodally-informed models of language development and language learning.