No abstract

It was concluded that all 3 gesture types under investigation contributed to the expression of semantic meaning communicated by PWA. Gestures are an important communicative means for PWA and should be regarded as such by their interlocutors. Gestures have been shown to enhance listeners' interpretation of PWA's overall communication.

Purpose People with aphasia (PWA) use different kinds of gesture spontaneously when they communicate. Although there is evidence that the nature of the communicative task influences the linguistic performance of PWA, so far little is known about the influence of the communicative task on the production of gestures by PWA. We aimed to investigate the influence of varying communicative constraints on the production of gesture and spoken expression by PWA in comparison to persons without language impairment. Method Twenty-six PWA with varying aphasia severities and 26 control participants (CP) without language impairment participated in the study. Spoken expression and gesture production were investigated in 2 different tasks: (a) spontaneous conversation about topics of daily living and (b) a cartoon narration task, that is, retellings of short cartoon clips. The frequencies of words and gestures as well as of different gesture types produced by the participants were analyzed and tested for potential effects of group and task. Results Main results for task effects revealed that PWA and CP used more iconic gestures and pantomimes in the cartoon narration task than in spontaneous conversation. Metaphoric gestures, deictic gestures, number gestures, and emblems were more frequently used in spontaneous conversation than in cartoon narrations by both participant groups. Group effects show that, in both tasks, PWA's gesture-to-word ratios were higher than those for the CP. Furthermore, PWA produced more interactive gestures than the CP in both tasks, as well as more number gestures and pantomimes in spontaneous conversation. Conclusions The current results suggest that PWA use gestures to compensate for their verbal limitations under varying communicative constraints. The properties of the communicative task influence the use of different gesture types in people with and without aphasia. Thus, the influence of communicative constraints needs to be considered when assessing PWA's multimodal communicative abilities.

Prosodic boundaries can be used to disambiguate the syntactic structure of coordinated name sequences (coordinates). To answer the question whether disambiguating prosody is produced in a situationally dependent or independent manner and to contribute to our understanding of the nature of the prosody-syntax link, we systematically explored variability in the prosody of boundary productions of coordinates evoked by different contextual settings in a referential communication task. Our analysis focused on prosodic boundaries produced to distinguish sequences with different syntactic structures (i.e., with or without internal grouping of the constituents). In German, these prosodic boundaries are indicated by three major prosodic cues: f0-range, final lengthening, and pause. In line with the Proximity/Anti-Proximity principle of the syntax-prosody model by Kentner and Féry (2013), speakers clearly use all three cues for constituent grouping and prosodically mark groups within and at their right boundary, indicating that prosodic phrasing is not a local phenomenon. Intra-individually, we found a rather stable prosodic pattern across contexts. However, inter-individually speakers differed from each other with respect to the prosodic cue combinations that they (consistently) used to mark the boundaries. Overall, our data speak in favour of a close link between syntax and prosody and for situational independence of disambiguating prosody.