The Group of prosodic Studies is part of the Research Unit in Linguistics and is led by Dra. Pilar Prieto. The group focuses on the role of prosody and gesture in human communication, in language understanding and language processing. Important areas of interest include the interface between audiovisual prosody and pragmatics, the cognitive processes behind the processing of audiovisual prosody, as well as the acquisition of audiovisual prosody in L1 and L2. the primary languages under investigation are Catalan, Spanish, occitan, English and Sardinian.
The main research lines are:
- Romance prosody
- Audiovisual prosody
- The acquisition of audiovisual prosody and meaning
- Temporal relationship between prosody and gesture
- Cognitive processing of prosody