Conversational gestures in autism spectrum disorders: asynchrony but not decreased frequency.
For autistic teens, coaching gesture timing beats counting gestures.
01Research in Context
What this study did
de Marchena et al. (2010) watched autistic and neurotypical teens tell a story. They counted hand gestures and checked if the gestures lined up with the words.
The team used video and motion coding. They wanted to know if autistic teens move their hands less, or if the timing is just off.
What they found
Both groups used about the same number of gestures. The autistic teens only looked different because their hands and words did not match in time.
Listeners rated the mistimed stories as harder to follow. More gestures did not help if the timing was wrong.
How this fits with other research
Attwood et al. (1988) saw younger autistic kids start fewer gestures even when they understood them. Ashley shows the gap may close by teen years, but timing stays off.
de Korte et al. (2021) filmed autistic adults and found odd movement speeds. Their data extend Ashley’s timing point into adulthood, showing the issue persists.
Eussen et al. (2016) found autistic children struggle most when adults ask for elicited gesture imitation. Ashley adds that everyday storytelling is also harmed by poor timing, not poor output.
Why it matters
You can stop pushing kids to make more gestures. Instead, rehearse the script first, then add the hand motion. Use video modeling that shows one clear beat between word and gesture. This small timing drill may lift story clarity without extra language goals.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Conversational or "co-speech" gestures play an important role in communication, facilitating turntaking, providing visuospatial information, clarifying subtleties of emphasis, and other pragmatic cues. Consistent with other pragmatic language deficits, individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are said to produce fewer conversational gestures, as specified in many diagnostic measures. Surprisingly, while research shows fewer deictic gestures in young children with ASD, there is a little empirical evidence addressing other forms of gesture. The discrepancy between clinical and empirical observations may reflect impairments unrelated to frequency, such as gesture quality or integration with speech. Adolescents with high-functioning ASD (n = 15), matched on age, gender, and IQ to 15 typically developing (TD) adolescents, completed a narrative task to assess the spontaneous production of speech and gesture. Naïve observers rated the stories for communicative quality. Overall, the ASD group's stories were rated as less clear and engaging. Although utterance and gesture rates were comparable, the ASD group's gestures were less closely synchronized with the co-occurring speech, relative to control participants. This gesture-speech synchrony specifically impacted communicative quality across participants. Furthermore, while story ratings were associated with gesture count in TD adolescents, no such relationship was observed in adolescents with ASD, suggesting that gestures do not amplify communication in this population. Quality ratings were, however, correlated with ASD symptom severity scores, such that participants with fewer ASD symptoms were rated as telling higher quality stories. Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of communication and neuropsychological functioning in ASD.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2010 · doi:10.1002/aur.159