Chapter 9 The Concomitance of Speech and Manual Gesture in Aphasic Subjects

Abstract

Contradictory findings about the gestural behavior of aphasic subjects during speaking have been reported. In the present paper, a first study of 12 aphasic and 6 normal control subjects was aimed at demonstrating that different patterns of association between gestures and speech may be found, and that this variability does not relate to aphasia type defined by fluency or use of content words. In a second part, a single case study was used to analyze the relationships between gestures and speech in a subject who suffered from semantic impairments without deficits in the output phonological processing (transcortical sensory aphasia). Four tasks were designed from a single set of items: picture naming, elicitation of communicative gestures from pictures and names, and word-to-picture matching. In the visual input conditions, verbal and gestural performance were significantly associated, but in the auditory input conditions, the number of correct gestures was not related to correct word-to-picture matching Furthermore, gestures were more often judged correct in the auditory than in the visual condition, and the two performances were not related to each other. These results partially support the hypothesis of association between verbal and gestural behavior in a patient suffering from defective semantic processing, and they do not support the hypothesis of a direct link between visual object recognition and motor programming.