After having designed the materials for my first experiment, I ran two piloting versions. On January, I ran a prepilot with three people who knew about the goal of the study. That was done so that I could make sure that the instructions and the stimuli were clear enough. This first prepilot allowed me to detect some aspects that could be improved, such as certain stimuli transitions or the form of a few words that could interfere with the participants’ mother tongue. Having enhanced these parts, in March I ran a pilot with three different people who did not know about the phenomenon under investigation, so that they would act as real participants. The experiment seemed to run successfully, so no major changes were applied; however, it was useful to reduce the length of the first experimental phase, which seemed to be too long.

Since September 2024, I specifically worked on the design of the stimuli for the first experiment of my thesis. The experiment aims at exploring the role of prominence in the acquisition and the generalization of verb-inflectional morphemes (particularly, singular and plural) among typically-developing adults. To do so, I have prepared the stimuli of my first experiment of the thesis. It consists of video recordings in which a Catalan-speaking person produces non-sense words (verbs) with different prominence markers on the inflectional morpheme: no prominence, prosodic prominence and multimodal prominence. Each of the videos representing verbs is simultaneously matched with a picture of an image (AI-generated picture) representing an action that is either in a singular form (e.g. a person biking – duntol) or in a plural form (i.e., more than one person biking – duntop). This process has contributed to a better understanding of  the methodologies used within language acquisition and to develop critical thinking skills in order to scientifically assess the efficiency of my design.

Along with Milena Álvarez Andrade (PhD student in the same program as me), Dra. Núria Esteve-Gibert and Dr. Llorenç Andreu, I’m working as a co-author in a systematic review focused on the influence of prosodic prominence and rhythmic gestures in the comprehension of sentences among children with DLD. This is Milena’s PhD topic, in which we clearly share many research interests: the effect of prosody, the role of gestures, and the comprehension of messages (in my case, however, of morphological elements). Since October, we have regularly met online and have carried out the following tasks: designed the research protocol, conducted the article screening and started selecting the categories with which we will classify and analyse each article. This has especially helped me to gather literature on my topic of research and to reflect upon methodologies used within the field, which is crucial on the first steps of my investigation process.