Prosodic and gestural cues to meaning in developmental language disorder

This doctoral thesis investigates how prosodic and gestural cues support language processing in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) compared to typically developing peers. Through three eye-tracking experiments with Catalan-speaking children aged 5–10, it examines how multimodal input aids the comprehension of structural and pragmatic meanings and how memory capacities modulate this use. Study 1 shows that prosody facilitates the resolution of syntactic ambiguities, whereas gestures do not enhance comprehension. Study 2 reveals that gestures provide compensatory support for pragmatic inference, especially in indirect requests. Study 3 demonstrates that verbal and visuospatial memory predict individual differences in the integration of multimodal cues. Overall, the results show that prosody serves as a reliable linguistic cue, while gesture plays a compensatory role when processing demands increase. These findings refine models of multimodal communication and have implications for language intervention in children with DLD.