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Do Verbal Children with Autism Comprehend Gesture as Readily as Typically Developing Children?

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Abstract

Gesture comprehension remains understudied, particularly in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who have difficulties in gesture production. Using a novel gesture comprehension task, Study 1 examined how 2- to 4-year-old typically-developing (TD) children comprehend types of gestures and gesture–speech combinations, and showed better comprehension of deictic gestures and reinforcing gesture–speech combinations than iconic/conventional gestures and supplementary gesture–speech combinations at each age. Study 2 compared verbal children with ASD to TD children, comparable in receptive language ability, and showed similar patterns of comprehension in each group. Our results suggest that children comprehend deictic gestures and reinforcing gesture–speech combinations better than iconic/conventional gestures and supplementary combinations—a pattern that remains robust across different ages within TD children and children with ASD.

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Notes

  1. Ages are reported in years; months.

  2. Three-year-olds showed comprehension above chance for each gesture type (deictic: t(14) = 7.21, p ≤ .001, conventional: t(14) = 3.42, p = .004, iconic: t(14) = 3.66, p = .003) and each communicative modality (speech: t(14) = 7.72, p ≤ .001, gesture-only: t(14) = 4.90, p ≤ .001, reinforcing gesture + speech: t(14) = 5.02, p ≤ .001, supplementary gesture + speech: t(14) = 4.16, p = .001). The same pattern was found for 4-year olds, for both gesture types (deictic: t(12) = 14.51, p ≤ .001, conventional: t(12) = 7.40, p ≤ .001, iconic: t(12) = 8.65, p ≤ .001) and communicative modalities (speech: t(12) = 6.60, p ≤ .001, gesture-only: t(12) = 17.52, p ≤ .001, reinforcing gesture + speech: t(12) = 11.61, p ≤ .001, supplementary gesture + speech: t(12) = 4.38, p = .001).

  3. We originally tested 48 children with ASD but had to exclude 18 of them because their score on the PPVT was outside the range of receptive language abilities for the 41 TD children (i.e., they were nonverbal or already producing complex speech, n = 9) or they did not complete the comprehension task (n = 9).

  4. The pattern of findings remained unchanged in analysis that excluded these two children from the ASD sample.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by Swiss National Science Foundation Grant # P300Pr_151180/1 awarded to the first author and by National Science Foundation Grant # BCS 1251337 awarded to the second author. We would like to thank Diana Robins for her help with subject recruitment; we also thank Aleisha Rucker, Alia DeBurro, Ashlee Wetherbee, Lauren Schmuck, Tikenya Joseph, Keller Street, Siri Choragudi, Ayse Banu Cinar, Carissa Lavin, Mina Oguz, Sheetal Amin, Hellen Oliveira, Zeynep Ozenay, and Jhonelle Bailey for their help with data collection, and the families for their participation in our study. Findings from Study 1 were presented at the International Society for Gesture Studies (ISGS) conference in 2016 in Paris, France. Findings from Study 2 were presented at the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) in 2016 in Boston, United States.

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  1. Nevena Dimitrova

    Present address: Service for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (SUPEA)-Research Unit, Vaud University Hospital (CHUV), 9, Av. d’Echallens, 1004, Lausanne, Switzerland

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Georgia State University, P.O. Box 5010, Atlanta, GA, 30302, USA

    Nevena Dimitrova, Şeyda Özçalışkan & Lauren B. Adamson

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  1. Nevena Dimitrova
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Contributions

All authors participated in the conception and design of the study, in the interpretation of the findings, and in the drafting of the manuscript. In addition, ND recruited the participants, gathered the data, and performed the statistical analysis; SO supervised the coding of child gestures; LBA assisted in the recruitment of ASD participants. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Nevena Dimitrova.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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All parents provided informed consent for their and their child’s participation prior to their inclusion in the study.

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Dimitrova, N., Özçalışkan, Ş. & Adamson, L.B. Do Verbal Children with Autism Comprehend Gesture as Readily as Typically Developing Children?. J Autism Dev Disord 47, 3267–3280 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3243-9

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