Abstract
Previous findings on gestural impairment in autism are inconsistent, while scant evidence came from Chinese-speaking individuals. In the present study, preschool Chinese-speaking children with typical development and with autism were asked to generate stories from a set of wordless Cartoon pictures. Two groups were matched in chronological age and language developmental age. Their speech and gestures were coded. Compared to children with typical development, children with autism produced fewer gestures and showed lower gesture rate. Besides, children with autism produced fewer emblems and fewer supplementary gestures compared to their TD peers. Unlike children with typical development, children with autism tend to produce emblems for reinforcing, rather than supplementing information not conveyed in speech. Results showed the impairments in integrating the cross-modal semantic information in children with autism.
Highlights
Children typically exhibit communicative behaviors during their first year
The children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) produced fewer emblems and supplementary gestures, while the numbers of deictic gestures, iconic gestures, reinforcing gestures, and disambiguating gestures they produced were comparable to the typically developing (TD) group (Table 3)
Results of the present study showed that the children with ASD had a lower gesture rate, which is consistent with the findings reported by So et al (2015) and Silverman et al (2017), whose participants were either school-age children or adolescents
Summary
Children typically exhibit communicative behaviors during their first year. spoken words become a preferred form of communication after the first year of development, children continue to gesture to reinforce or extend spoken messages or even to replace them (Colletta and Guidetti, 2012). Impairments in nonverbal skills, such as the use of gestures, from early childhood to school age in children with ASD have been reported In comparison to their typically developing (TD) peers, children with ASD have deficits in understanding and producing gestures (Colgan et al, 2006; Mitchell et al, 2006). Compared to mentally retarded children matched on mental age or language age, children with ASD showed deficits in gestural joint attention skills, which predicted their language development (Mundy et al, 1990). They have difficulties in understanding and producing
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