Gesture is a facet of non-verbal communication between humans, used to aid in speech comprehension. Gestures include various movements done alongside speech, such as rolling the eyes or waving a hand. Gestures can either match spoken words or provide additional information about something being discussed. Researcher Elizabeth Wakefield and Natalie Zielinski discuss how gesture can aid in foreign language comprehension for bilingual children in her paper “Language Proficiency Impacts the Benefits of Co-Speech Gesture for Narrative Understanding Through a Visual Attention Mechanism” (2021). Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder characterized by many distinct symptoms as a result of differences in brain structure and connection. One of the main symptoms is difficulty with social comprehension. As discussed earlier, gesture is something that may be able to aid in traditional speech interpretations and to aid in communication from an autistic person to those with typical communicative development (TD). This is what Sara Ramos-Cabo, Valentin Vulchanov, and Mila Vulchanova look into in their research paper “Gesture and Language Trajectories in Early Development: An Overview From the Autism Spectrum Disorder Perspective,” seeking to differentiate early comprehension patterns as it relates to gesture between those with ASD and TD (2019).
Dr. Wakefield’s research doesn’t only surround gesture as it relates to bilingual comprehension in a weaker language, but how matching gesture can add to comprehension of speech in children with TD (Wakefield et al. 2018). Her findings indicate that when a gesture coincides with a spoken message, the message conveyed is more easily learned. To do this, she utilized eye tracking technology to follow where children were looking while being taught a technique to solve simple math problems. Of two groups, the ones who were shown gestures alongside verbal explanation tended to not only follow the gestures with their eyes, but also score better when asked questions that employed the technique. Her research only takes into account learning of those with TD, which is where the other research can lend a comparative helping hand.
The main question Sara Ramos-Cabo, Valentin Vulchanov, and Mila Vulchanova wanted to answer was whether gesture could be reasonably used as a predictor on social ability and language comprehension/acquisition in those with ASD, similar to how it is for those with TD (2019). If it could be used as a model, they also wanted to know how accurate it could be used as a predictor for this metric. They found that, indeed, gesture was associated with language for autistic people, and that the correlations were both qualitative and quantitative predictors. The main form of gesture that can be used for these metrics is deictic gesture, which adds information to communication that isn’t spoken. Infants with ASD had a harder time than those with TD when it came to interpreting and understanding messages derived from these. They theorize that this is due to the increased amount of interpretation and emphasis placed on deictic gesture, as there aren’t direct outside clues as to how the gestures are to be interpreted, tying back into the communicative struggles of ASD.
Elizabeth Wakefield’s research shows how gesture is used by bilingual people as well as TD children, demonstrating the effects matching or complementary gestures aid in comprehension (2018, 2021). This basis is then used by Sara Ramos-Cabo, Valentin Vulchanov, and Mila Vulchanova in their research to compare and contrast TD gesture with ASD gesture (2019). The work of all of these researchers comes together to show the effects of matching/complementary gestures and how they contrast with the effects of mismatching/deictic gestures. Their work paints a larger picture of how gesture impacts communication and understanding of the world as a whole, for both people with TD and ASD.
References
Ramos-Cabo, S., Vulchanov, V., & Vulchanova, M. (2019). Gesture and Language Trajectories in Early Development: An Overview From the Autism Spectrum Disorder Perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01211
Wakefield, E., Novack, M. A., Congdon, E. L., Franconeri, S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2018). Gesture helps learners learn, but not merely by guiding their visual attention. Developmental Science, 21(6), e12664. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12664
Zielinski, N., & Wakefield, E. M. (2021). 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, 43(43). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/63r5d3qq
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