How children with developmental language disorder use co-speech gestures to communicate
Résumé
This study explores whether gesture-speech coordination in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) enhances their communication. Multimodal approaches (Kendon, 1980, 2004; McNeill, 1992) have recently been integrated in the field of language impairment. Several authors (Botting et al., 2010; Iverson & Braddock, 2011; Alibali et al., 2009) showed that children with DLD produce more gestures than typically developing (TD) children, when struggling with conceptual expression or lexical access (Mainela-Arnold et al., 2014). Can gestures aim to compensate for linguistic difficulties, thus making children with DLD produce more gesture than TD children? We video-recorded 30 French-speaking children (15 children with DLD and 15 TD children) aged 8 to 11. Children first played a guessing game with the examiner and then described their room. For each recording, we determined the quantity and types of hand gestures produced. We then examined whether gestures were strictly related to speech and how they were integrated in children's verbal productions in the two types of activities. Results showed significant qualitative and quantitative differences between TD children and those with DLD. During the guessing game, children with DLD produced more gestures, which were mostly representational. TD children produced fewer gestures, which were mostly rhythmic and self-regulatory. However, during the description task, children with DLD used fewer gestures than TD children. Both groups produced deictic and representational gestures. Moreover, the gestures were strongly complementary to speech. The findings show the complexity of gesture-speech coordination in children with DLD. Speech elaboration is a multimodal process where gestures play an important role. However, according to the nature of the difficulties in communication, gestures can both be inhibited or strongly mobilized and facilitate expression. Gestures can therefore convey additional information to what is conveyed verbally in both types of population and are used differently according to the type of activity.
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