Coego, SaraEsteve Gibert, NúriaPrieto Vives, Pilar, 1965-2025-07-162025-07-162025Coego S, Esteve-Gibert N, Prieto P. Preschoolers mark focus types through multimodal prominence: further evidence for the precursor role of gestures. Languages. 2025 Apr 26;10(5):92. DOI: 10.3390/languages100500922226-471Xhttp://hdl.handle.net/10230/70921The 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.application/pdfeng© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages10050092Information structureFocus typesContrastCorrectionMultimodal developmentProsodyGesturesProminenceLanguage acquisitionCatalaninfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess