Ingrid Vilà-Giménez is an Assistant Professor ("Professora Lectora" in the Catalan system) in the Department of Specific Didactics (Faculty of Education & Psychology) at the Universitat de Girona. She received her PhD in Language Sciences from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in 2020.
Since 2020, she has been teaching on the BAs in Primary and Early Childhood School Education as well as on the Dual BA. Additionally, she has been a lecturer at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences) since 2018. In 2022, she also collaborated with the Universitat de Vic-Universitat Central de Catalunya/Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. From 2016 to 2020, she was a teaching assistant at the Dept. of Translation and Language Sciences at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Her research lies in the field of language acquisition and development, with a particular focus on the multimodal interaction between gesture and speech prosody and on how these multimodal resources support children's learning and development. She is particularly interested in how multimodal communication contributes to the development of oral language skills, including discourse and pragmatic abilities, as well as broader cognitive skills. Her research also explores the educational implications of multimodal communication—specifically, how gestures and other multimodal cues can enhance teaching and learning, and how they can be integrated into teacher training to improve instructional practices. Her PhD dissertation, Non-referential beat gestures as a window onto the development of children’s narrative abilities, examined several issues related to the bootstrapping role of non-referential beat gestures —and their concomitant prosodic prominence— in 5- to 6-year-old children’s narrative abilities (cum laude, International Mention and Extraordinary Doctorate Award).
In 2017, she did a research stay at the University of Chicago (Illinois, USA), with Prof. Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago) and Dr. Ece Demir-Lira (University of Iowa). She is currently a research member of the Comparative Minds Research Group (Faculty of Education and Psychology, Universitat de Girona) and has also been a research member of the Prosodic and Gestural Studies Group (GrEPG, Universitat Pompeu Fabra) since 2016. Previously, she was also a member of the GRECA research group (Universitat de Girona). She has published peer-reviewed papers in international journals and conference proceedings. She has participated in national and international conferences as an author and co-author of more than 40 presentations. She is part of several research projects funded at national and international levels. She has served as a reviewer for different scientific JCR journals and conferences of international prestige and has been invited to join the Editorial Board of Multimodality of Communication (section Frontiers in Communication, JCR Journal) as a Review Editor.
Personal website: www.ingridvilagimenez.com
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ingrid-Vila-Gimenez