Communicative effectiveness of pantomime gesture in people with aphasia

Abstract

Background: Human communication occurs through both verbal and visual/motoric modalities. Simultaneous conversational speech and gesture occurs across all cultures and age groups. When verbal communication is compromised, more of the communicative load can be transferred to the gesture modality. Although people with aphasia produce meaning-laden gestures, the communicative value of these has not been adequately investigated. Aims: To investigate the communicative effectiveness of pantomime gesture produced spontaneously by individuals with aphasia during conversational discourse. Methods & Procedures:Sixty-seven undergraduate students wrote down the messages conveyed by 11 people with aphasia that produced pantomime while engaged in conversational discourse. Students were presented with a speech-only, a gesture-only and a combined speech and gesture condition and guessed messages in both a free description and a multiple-choice task. Outcomes & Results:As hypothesized, listener comprehension was more accurate in the combined pantomime gesture and speech condition as compared with the gesture-or speech-only conditions. Participants achieved greater accuracy in the multiple-choice task as compared with the free-description task, but only in the gestureonly condition. The communicative effectiveness of the pantomime gestures increased as the fluency of the participants with aphasia decreased. Conclusions & Implications:These results indicate that when pantomime gesture was presented with aphasic speech, the combination had strong communicative effectiveness. Future studies could investigate how pantomimes can be integrated into interventions for people with aphasia, particularly emphasizing elicitation of pantomimes in as natural a context as possible and highlighting the opportunity for efficient message repair.

The communicative advantage: how kinematic signaling supports semantic comprehension

“…Our work has further implications for clinical practice, where it can be applied to areas such as communication disorders. Research has shown that people with aphasia use gestures, including pantomimes, to supplement the semantic content of their speech (DeBeer et al, 2015;Rose, Mok, & Sekine, 2017). Knowledge of which features contribute to semantically recognizable gestures could, therefore, be applied to developing therapies for more effective pantomime use and understanding.…”

The comprehensibility of pantomimes produced by people with aphasia

“…Most of the earlier research on PWA's gesturing focused on co-speech gestures (e.g., Cocks et al 2013, Coelho 1990, Hogrefe et al 2012 with only a few studies looking at the comprehensibility of these gestures. These studies showed that information in PWA's co-speech gestures can help interlocutors in identifying the message PWA try to convey, as PWA's gestures often convey information not conveyed in speech (de Beer et al 2017, Mol et al 2013, Rose et al 2016.…”

Evaluating Models of Gesture and Speech Production for People With Aphasia

“…The authors concluded that PWA compensate for their verbal limitations by employing gestures. Also using a rating paradigm, Rose, Mok, and Sekine (2017), focusing exclusively on pantomime gestures, confirmed the finding that PWA use gestures to express information that complements verbal speech. They compared the information expressed by both gesture and speech in isolation and by both channels in combination.…”

“…The combined and therefore most natural signal, consisting of both gesture and speech, was found to be most informative to the listeners. Following up on the study by Rose et al (2017), De Beer et al (2017) investigated the communicative role of three different gesture types, namely pantomimes, emblems, and referential gestures (a category containing both iconic and deictic gestures) in extracts from spontaneous conversations. The results revealed that the naive raters understood the messages expressed by the PWA of varying severities more accurately when they were expressed using gesture and speech as opposed to speech alone.…”