Gestures in Children with Autism

In Dr. Wakefield and Natalia Zielinski's 2021 paper titled "Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism", the concept of gestures aiding comprehension was explored- primarily the usage in native languages verse secondary languages. Gestures are nonverbal cues that are used alongside speech and were divided into two categories by Dr. Wakefield: gesture matches and mismatches. While these names are a bit misleading, gesture matches simply refer to gestures that signify what is already being said in the speech, while mismatches provide additional information or details that are not included in the speech. In her study, Dr. Wakefield tested the roles of gestures on understanding across multiple variables: proficient vs amateur, and match vs. match. Her and her colleagues achieved this by testing the comprehension of Polish school students when given a story in English (fluent) and a story in Polish (not fluent), and whether gestures where or where not given and the type of gesture varied by experimental group. The results were interpreted based on visual attention given to the gestures in terms of time and overall recall of details from the stories. 

Dr. Wakefield's studies found that gestures aided comprehension in language of lesser proficiency, in this case Polish, highlighted by higher visual attention to the gestures in the Polish story and higher level of recall in the Polish story with gestures compared to the Polish story without. Similarly, the study found that mismatch gestures supported recall more than match gestures, likely to the redundancy of match gestures and the novel information provided in mismatch gestures. While these findings were significant in assessing the roles of gestures in language comprehension, many have wondered the role for children with cognitive development issues and how gestures may aid their comprehension.

A behavioral development lab in Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China explored the role of gestures associated with speech in two-to-four year old children with Autism Spectrum Disorder compared to more typical developing (TD) children. Building on an idea similar to the findings of Dr. Wakefield, the study hypothesized that children with impaired cognitive development due to ASD were likely to produce less gestures than typical developing children, and this lack of gestures would correspond to lower "social" ability and "adaptive" behavior scores. Social ability refers to the child's ability to engage in social situations and interactions (predicted to be lower in children with ASD). Similarly, adaptive ability is how able the child is to perform daily life tasks (also predicted to be lower). To test these variables, the two experimental groups (being ASD children and TD children) were put into "semi-structured play sessions" and the use of gestures was assessed along with behavior, and then the results were analyzed and scored using the "Adaptive Behavior Assessment System" (ABAS).

The study found that children with ASD used gestures less frequently than TD children, with an even more dramatic deficit in the use of "joint attention gestures", which are ones used primarily for social communication. Similarly, like how Dr. Wakefield's studied looked at visual attention to gestures, this study found that ASD children have a decreased amount of "gaze" or visual attention time allocated to gestures then TD children. Finally, all these results culminated in lower ABAS scores for ASD children, marking a decreased social ability and adaptive behavior ability, correlating with the understanding that ASD children have a more difficult time in social scenarios and performing various life tasks. 

Seeing how Dr. Wakefield's study found that gestures provide added benefit to children learning in their less fluent language, perhaps there can be a correlation to gestures providing added benefit in social ability in ASD children, as social interaction can be seen as a less fluent language for children with this development disability. However, the finding of ASD children using gestures less frequently puts a roadblock in this hypothesis. Perhaps further research can focus on ways to increase the usage of gestures in ASD children and assessing the changes in behavioral scores correlated with this research. Either way, gestures have proved to be a powerful tool in both comprehension and interaction. 

Ye, Q., Liu, L., Lv, S., Cheng, S., Zhu, H., Xu, Y., Zou, X., & Deng, H. (2021, February 10). The gestures in 2–4-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.604542 

Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. M. (2021, July 19). Language proficiency impacts the benefits of co-speech gesture for narrative understanding through a visual attention mechanism. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/63r5d3qq