We warmly congratulate ViCom participant Pilar Prieto on being awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for her project PROSODY-SENSES.

With funding of €2,499,336, the project will investigate how prosody is expressed and coordinated across different sensory channels. Rather than understanding prosody primarily as a vocal phenomenon, PROSODY-SENSES explores the role of voice, visual gesture and tactile signals in the organisation and highlighting of information in language.

The project will examine spoken languages, sign languages and tactile sign languages used by Deaf and deafblind people. Its overarching goal is to develop a more inclusive and comprehensive account of how humans organise language through the senses.

The research strongly resonates with ViCom’s interest in multimodal communication and with the MultIS project, in which Pilar Prieto and Frank Kügler investigate the interaction of gesture and prosody in the expression of information structure.

Further information is available in the UPF announcement.