Poster #53 - Do Former Late Talkers Use Gesture to Supplement Spoken Language?

• In Event: Poster Session 06

Abstract

Narrative skills are an important component of language development and present a rich context within which to investigate young children’s language ability. One component of communicating a narrative is gesture. The gestures children use during storytelling have been linked to the structure of their narratives (Demir et al., 2015) and may be used as a compensatory mechanism when spoken language needs a literal ‘helping hand’. These include both redundant gestures, which can be used to emphasize language, and non-redundant gestures, which can add to or disambiguate spoken language (Alibali et al., 2009; Hostetter & Alibali, 2011). Previous studies show that, at age two, Late Talkers (LT) rely more on gesture than their typically developing peers (Iverson & Braddock, 2011; Thal & Tobias, 1992). But what happens as children who experienced language delays enter the preschool years? The current study explores gesture use during a wordless cartoon narrative retell task with former Late Talkers (fLT) and Typical Talkers (TT) at age four. We hypothesized that gesture would serve as a compensatory mechanism to support verbal language production in fLTs, and therefore would be used differently across the two groups. Preliminary data (n=32, fLT n=15; TT n=17) show that while there were no significant differences between TTs and fLTs in the overall number of gestures (t(30) = .226, p = .82) or gesture types (representational vs. deictic) used (t(29) = -.223, p = .41), there were differences between these two groups in the role gesture played in supporting language. In particular, former Late Talkers used a higher proportion of non-redundant gestures compared to typical talkers (t(29) = 2.38, p = .037). This suggests that while TT and fLTs both use their hands extensively when retelling a narrative, fLT are more likely to convey information which is absent from their speech uniquely in the manual modality. These preliminary findings further suggest that former Late Talkers may continue to use gesture as a means of adding or disambiguating the information conveyed in their spoken language. Analyses of the completed dataset (expected n=40 by October 2022) will further shed light on how gesture was used in this task, as well as the complexity of participants’ spoken language and the structure of the narratives in the speech modality. Understanding how children across a spectrum of language ability use gesture while producing narratives provides a more holistic view of their communication skills and may inform intervention targets for those at the lower end of that ability spectrum.

Authors

• Murielle Standley, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author

• Miriam A Novack, Northwestern University

• Philip Curtis

• Jill Rawls

• Charlotte Herbolsheimer

• Magda Slowakiewicz

• Adriana Weisleder, Northwestern University