Hübscher, IrisPrieto Vives, Pilar, 1965-2020-04-222020-04-222019Hübscher I, Prieto P. Gestural and prosodic development act as sister systems and jointly pave the way for children’s sociopragmatic development. Front Psychol. 2019 Jun 12;10:1259. DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.012591664-1078http://hdl.handle.net/10230/44310Children might combine gesture and prosody to express a pragmatic meaning such as a request, information focus, uncertainty or politeness, before they can convey these meanings in speech. However, little is known about the developmental trajectories of gestural and prosodic patterns and how they relate to a child’s growing understanding and propositional use of these sociopragmatic meanings. Do gesture and prosody act as sister systems in pragmatic development? Do children acquire these components of language before they are able to express themselves through spoken language, thus acting as forerunners in children’s pragmatic development? This review article assesses empirical evidence that demonstrates that gesture and prosody act as intimately related systems and, importantly, pave the way for pragmatic acquisition at different developmental stages. The review goes on to explore how the integration of gesture and prosody with semantics and syntax can impact language acquisition and how multimodal interventions can be used effectively in educational settings. Our review findings support the importance of simultaneously assessing both the prosodic and the gestural components of language in the fields of language development, language learning, and language intervention.application/pdfeng© 2019 Hübscher and Prieto. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01259Gesture acquisitionProsody acquisitionSociopragmatic developmentMultimodal communication and learningChild language acquisitioninfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess