The objective of this special issue is to present innovative research demonstrating that prosody needs to be reconceptualized as an inherently multimodal phenomenon, manifested across the spoken and/or visual domains. The studies included are organized into three core themes. Theme 1 addresses the temporal alignment of spoken and visual aspects of prosody, and how this is shaped by linguistic factors, speaker-specific traits (such as neurodiversity) and language learning patterns. Theme 2 deals with the coordination of spoken and visual aspects of prosody in conveying pragmatic intent, focusing on aspects such as negation, emotion and epistemic stance. Theme 3 explores how visual signals, including head movements and manual signals, fulfil essential prosodic roles across diverse sign language typologies. Taken together, the empirical evidence presented here shows that prosody is also embodied and that our bodily movements can manifest prosodic characteristics. On the one hand, they show the need to comprehensively re-evaluate our understanding of how speakers, listeners and learners engage with the prosodic dimension of language. On the other hand, they reveal that non-referential gestures are deeply meaningful and prosodically structured. Ultimately, visual cues are presented as indispensable for building accurate models of the human language capacity.

This study addresses the importance of orofacial gestures and acoustic cues to execute prosodic patterns under different communicative settings in Farsi. Given that Farsi lacks morpho-syntactic markers for polar questions, we aim to determine whether specific facial movements accompany the prosodic correlates of questionhood in Farsi under conditions of degraded information, that is, whispering and wearing face masks. We hypothesise speakers will employ the most pronounced facial expressions when whispering questions with a face mask to compensate for the absence of F0, reduced intensity and lower face invisibility. To this end, we conducted an experiment with 10 Persian speakers producing 10 pairs of statements and questions in normal and whispered speech modes with and without face masks. Our results provide support to our hypotheses that speakers will intensify their orofacial expressions when confronted with marked conditions. We interpreted our results in terms of the ‘hand in hand’ and ‘trade-off’ hypothesis. In whispered speech, the parallel realisation of longer word duration and orofacial expressions may be a compensatory mechanism for the limited options to convey intonation. Also, the lower face coverage is mutually compensated for by word duration and intensified upper facial expressions, all of which in turn support the trade-off hypothesis.