Gestural communication in children with autism spectrum disorders during mother–child interaction

Abstract

Children with autism spectrum disorders display atypical development of gesture production, and gesture impairment is one of the determining factors of autism spectrum disorder diagnosis. Despite the obvious importance of this issue for children with autism spectrum disorder, the literature on gestures in autism is scarce and contradictory. The purpose of this study was to analyze gestural communication in children with autism spectrum disorder during spontaneous mother-child interaction. Participants were children with autism spectrum disorder (n = 20), Down's syndrome (n = 20), and typical development (n = 20) and their mothers. Children's mean developmental age was 24.16 months (standard deviation = 1.45 months) and did not differ across the groups. Gestural communication was analyzed with a specific coding scheme allowing a quantitative and qualitative analysis of gestural production. Results showed the following: (a) differences between autism spectrum disorder, typical development, and Down's syndrome groups in the total number of gestures produced; (b) differences between the three groups in the distribution of gesture types; and (c) specific correlations between gestural production, cognitive development, and autism severity scores. The study of gestures in autism spectrum disorder could help us to identify different phenotypes in autism and could also lead to the development of new therapies.

The development of co-speech gesture and its semantic integration with speech in 6- to 12-year-old children with autism spectrum disorders

“…Our results are consistent with prior findings of studies with preschool-aged children (e.g. Mastrogiuseppe et al, 2014;Medeiros and Winsler, 2014;Stone et al, 1997; but see Attwood et al, 1988;Capps et al, 1998).…”

“…To our knowledge, no previous studies have addressed this issue in school-aged children. More importantly, most of these studies did not administer cognitive tasks in order to examine children's cognitive abilities (but see Mastrogiuseppe et al, 2014). Among various cognitive abilities, previous research has shown that verbal and spatial memories are associated with gesture frequency among normal individuals (Chu et al, 2014;Hostetter and Alibali, 2007;Sassenberg et al, 2011).…”

Early deictic but not other gestures predict later vocabulary in both typical development and autism

“…Importantly, the onset of such deictic gestures predicts the onset of similar spoken words in typically developing (TD) children (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 2005). Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show difficulties in early gesture use, particularly in the production of deictic gestures (e.g., Mastrogiuseppe, Capirci, Cuva, & Venuti, 2015; Mundy, Sigman, & Kasari, 1990; Gulsrud, Hellemann, Freeman, & Kasari, 2014); they also often show prolonged delays in producing words and use fewer words than TD children (Tager-Flusberg, 2007). In this study, we ask how the delays and difficulties in the vocabulary development of children with ASD are related to different gesture types (deictic, give, conventional, iconic) produced in different communicative contexts (commenting, requesting).…”

A joint behavioral and emotive analysis of synchrony in music therapy of children with autism spectrum disorders

“…Further, we have shown that a cycle of twenty sessions of IMT is enough for a child with ASD to have a gain in synchrony and social engagement. Moreover, we have shown that to be high-functioning helps in the adaptation and in the learning of abilities (Mastrogiuseppe, Capirci, Cuva, & Venuti, 2015;Venuti & Bentenuto, 2015;Quintin et al, 2011), so we could suggest this type of therapy as particularly useful for this subtype of patients with ASD.…”