Gestures and related skills in developmental coordination disorder: A production-system deficit?

Abstract

The present study investigated the nature and specificity of the gestural deficit in children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD). Performance of children with DCD is compared with that of typically developing children across tasks and conditions that allow exploring distinct levels hypothesized by adult models of praxis processing. These models generally involve a conceptual system and a production system. Within this theoretical framework, the study analyzed the extent to which the gestural difficulties of children with DCD are related to a deficit of the production system. Considering the heterogeneity of deficits consistently reported in DCD, we also examined whether gestural difficulties of children with DCD could imply impairments on other cognitive functions (executive functions, visual-perceptual, and visuospatial functions). Thirty children with DCD were compared to 30 typically developing children. The DCD group exhibited a deficit in most of the gesture production tasks (with the exception of representational intransitive ones), with impaired visuospatial skills. When controlling for a measure of visuospatial skill, differences between groups remained significant only for representational transitive gestures. This dysfunction could neither be related to a semantic deficit, nor to an impairment of sensorimotor knowledge. Therefore, if the contribution of a visuospatial dysfunction allows discussing the specificity of gestural deficit, this does not appear to explain the overall gestural deficit. We suggest an explanation of the finding within the assumption of a production-system deficit.

Behavioral and Neuroimaging Research on Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD): A Combined Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Recent Findings

“…There were 14 studies (13 high quality and 1 low) that contributed effect sizes in the sensori-perceptual task category, the magnitude of which was large overall ( d = 0.86, 95% CI [0.48, 1.25]), but with substantial heterogeneity ( I 2 = 87.2%) (Ghotbi et al, 2016 ; Prunty et al, 2016 ; Johnston et al, 2017 ; Wang et al, 2017 ; Costini et al, 2018 ; de Waal et al, 2018 ; Tseng et al, 2018 , 2019a , b ; Alesi et al, 2019a ; Chen et al, 2019 , 2020 ; Adi-Japha and Brestel, 2020 ; Nobusako et al, 2021 ). The combined ESs are presented in Figure 3 .…”

“…There were 21 studies (15 high quality, 4 moderate, and 2 low) that assessed aspects of executive function and intelligence, with a moderate overall effect ( d = 0.49, 95% CI [0.40, 0.59]) (Rahimi-Golkhandan et al, 2016 ; Schott et al, 2016 ; Sumner et al, 2016 ; Adams et al, 2017b ; Johnston et al, 2017 ; Mirabella et al, 2017 ; Wang et al, 2017 ; Bernardi et al, 2018 ; Costini et al, 2018 ; He et al, 2018a ; Koch et al, 2018 ; Michel et al, 2018 ; Thornton et al, 2018 ; Alesi et al, 2019b ; Barbacena et al, 2019 ; Job et al, 2019 ; Adi-Japha and Brestel, 2020 ; Gomez-Moya et al, 2020 ; Sartori et al, 2020 ; Suzuki et al, 2020 ; Wilson et al, 2020 ). The combined ESs are presented in Figure 4 .…”

“…For the action observation (AO), imitation and gesture production category, there were nine papers (seven high quality, one moderate, and one low) (Reynolds et al, 2017a ; Blais et al, 2018 ; Costini et al, 2018 ; Gauthier et al, 2018 ; Nobusako et al, 2018 ; Lust et al, 2019 ; Scott et al, 2019 , 2020 ; Bieber et al, 2021 ). The effects of MI andAO(in isolation or combined) on motor imitation was investigated in six of these studies.…”

Bibliometric analysis study on cognitive function in developmental coordination disorder from 2010 to 2022

“…Subara-Zukic and colleagues found that children with DCD have deficits in visual–motor mapping and cognitive–motor integration, manifested in the abnormal maturation of motor networks, and an area of practical compensation for motor control deficits ( Subara-Zukic et al, 2022 ). So the relationship between cognitive functions and motor control has also been highlighted in DCD ( Costini et al, 2018 ). Some studies have also suggested that abnormal brain motor imagery is an important factor leading to the impairment of motor activity in DCD ( Barhoun et al, 2019 ).…”