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Whose Gestures are More Predictive of Expressive Language Abilities among Chinese-Speaking Children with Autism? A Comparison of Caregivers’ and Children’s Gestures

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Abstract

In spite of the close relationship between gestures and expressive language, little research has examined the roles of the parents’ and children’s gestures in the development of expressive language abilities in autistic children. Previous findings are also inconclusive. In the present study, we coded the gestures produced by the parents and their autistic children in parent-child interactions and compared the influence of their gestures on the children’s expressive language abilities (N = 35; M = 4;10). Autistic children’s deictic gestures positively predicted their Mean Length Utterance (MLU), word types, and word tokens whereas parents’ deictic gesture inputs negatively predicted MLU and word types. The findings shed light on the importance of the gestures made by autistic children, which may trigger parents’ gesture-to-word translation.

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Notes

  1. In past studies of gestures produced by adults and children, the second coder coded around 10 to 20% of the gestures for reliability analyses (Azar et al., 2020; Huang et al., 2020).

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge Mui-Fong Wong for supervising the administration of ADOS-2. We are also grateful for the help of our research assistants Chi-Chung Chan, Chun-Ho Cheng, Johnny Fung, Fai-Yeung Kwok, Wing-Wun Law, Shing-Hey Lee, Ying-Yi Lee, Oi-Ki Leung, Jonathan Tse, Ching-Yi Wong, Tiffany Wong, and Yan-Yan Yip with data collection and transcription. Special thanks to all of the children and their parents for their help and dedication to education. This research has been fully supported by a grant from the Innovation and Technology Fund for Better Living (“FBL”; Project no. ITB/FBL/8005/17/P). The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. All the procedures were approved by the institutional review board of the first author’s university, in compliance with the Declaration of Helsinki (Survey and Behavioral Research Ethics Reference No. SBRE-19-307).

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  1. Department of Educational Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong

    Wing-Chee So & Xue-Ke Song

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  1. Wing-Chee So
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So, WC., Song, XK. Whose Gestures are More Predictive of Expressive Language Abilities among Chinese-Speaking Children with Autism? A Comparison of Caregivers’ and Children’s Gestures. J Autism Dev Disord 53, 3449–3459 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-022-05658-0

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