Nevena Dimitrova

Early deictic but not other gestures predict later vocabulary in both typical development and autism

Research with typically developing children suggests a strong positive relation between early gesture use and subsequent vocabulary development. In this study, we ask whether gesture production plays a similar role for children with autism spectrum disorder. We observed 23 18-month-old typically developing children and 23 30-month-old children with autism spectrum disorder interact with their caregivers (Communication Play Protocol) and coded types of gestures children produced (deictic, give, conventional, and iconic) in two communicative contexts (commenting and requesting). One year later, we assessed children’s expressive vocabulary, using Expressive Vocabulary Test. Children with autism spectrum disorder showed significant deficits in gesture production, particularly in deictic gestures (i.e. gestures that indicate objects by pointing at them or by holding them up). Importantly, deictic gestures—but not other gestures—predicted children’s vocabulary 1 year later regardless of communicative context, a pattern also found in typical development. We conclude that the production of deictic gestures serves as a stepping-stone for vocabulary development.

Parents’ Translations of Child Gesture Facilitate Word Learning in Children with Autism, Down Syndrome and Typical Development

Typically-developing (TD) children frequently refer to objects uniquely in gesture. Parents translate these gestures into words, facilitating children’s acquisition of these words (Goldin-Meadow et al. in Dev Sci 10(6):778–785, 2007). We ask whether this pattern holds for children with autism (AU) and with Down syndrome (DS) who show delayed vocabulary development. We observed 23 children with AU, 23 with DS, and 23 TD children with their parents over a year. Children used gestures to indicate objects before labeling them and parents translated their gestures into words. Importantly, children benefited from this input, acquiring more words for the translated gestures than the not translated ones. Results highlight the role contingent parental input to child gesture plays in language development of children with developmental disorders.

Baby Sign but Not Spontaneous Gesture Predicts Later Vocabulary in Children with Down Syndrome.

Early spontaneous gesture, specifically deictic gesture, predicts subsequent vocabulary development in typically developing (TD) children. Here, we ask whether deictic gesture plays a similar role in predicting later vocabulary size in children with Down Syndrome (DS), who have been shown to have difficulties in speech production, but strengths in spontaneous gesture and baby sign use. We compared the gestures and baby signs produced by twenty-three children with DS (Mage = 2;6) and twenty-three TD children (Mage = 1;6), in relation to their expressive spoken vocabulary size one year later. Children with DS showed significant deficits in gesture production, particularly for deictic gestures, but strengths in baby sign production, compared to their typically developing peers. More importantly, it was the baby signs produced by children with DS, but not deictic gestures, that predicted their spoken vocabulary size one year later. Our results further highlight the important role baby signs can play in language development in children with developmental disorders.

How gesture input provides a helping hand to language development

Children use gesture to refer to objects before they produce labels for these objects and gesture-speech combinations to convey semantic relations between objects before conveying sentences in speech--a trajectory that remains largely intact across children with different developmental profiles. Can the developmental changes that we observe in children be traced back to the gestural input that children receive from their parents? A review of previous work shows that parents provide models for their children for the types of gestures and gesture-speech combinations to produce, and do so by modifying their gestures to meet the communicative needs of their children. More importantly, the gestures that parents produce, in addition to providing models, help children learn labels for referents and semantic relations between these referents and even predict the extent of childrens vocabularies several years later. The existing research thus highlights the important role parental gestures play in shaping childrens language learning trajectory.

Early Gesture Provides a Helping Hand to Spoken Vocabulary Development for Children with Autism, Down Syndrome, and Typical Development.

ABSTRACT Typically developing (TD) children refer to objects uniquely in gesture (e.g., point at a cat) before they produce verbal labels for these objects (“cat”). The onset of such gestures predicts the onset of similar spoken words, showing a strong positive relation between early gestures and early words. We asked whether gesture plays the same door-opening role in word learning for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and Down syndrome (DS), who show delayed vocabulary development and who differ in the strength of gesture production. To answer this question, we observed 23 18-month-old TD children, 23 30-month-old children with ASD, and 23 30-month-old children with DS 5 times over a year during parent–child interactions. Children in all 3 groups initially expressed a greater proportion of referents uniquely in gesture than in speech. Many of these unique gestures subsequently entered children’s spoken vocabularies within a year—a pattern that was slightly less robust for children with DS, whose word production was the most markedly delayed. These results indicate that gesture is as fundamental to vocabulary development for children with developmental disorders as it is for TD children.

Do Verbal Children with Autism Comprehend Gesture as Readily as Typically Developing Children

Gesture comprehension remains understudied, particularly in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who have difficulties in gesture production. Using a novel gesture comprehension task, Study 1 examined how 2- to 4-year-old typically-developing (TD) children comprehend types of gestures and gesture–speech combinations, and showed better comprehension of deictic gestures and reinforcing gesture–speech combinations than iconic/conventional gestures and supplementary gesture–speech combinations at each age. Study 2 compared verbal children with ASD to TD children, comparable in receptive language ability, and showed similar patterns of comprehension in each group. Our results suggest that children comprehend deictic gestures and reinforcing gesture–speech combinations better than iconic/conventional gestures and supplementary combinations—a pattern that remains robust across different ages within TD children and children with ASD.

Visual Analysis of Proximal Temporal Relationships of Social and Communicative Behaviors

Developmental psychology researchers examine the temporal relationships of social and communicative behaviors, such as how a child responds to a name call, to understand early typical and atypical development and to discover early signs of autism and developmental delay. These related behaviors occur together or within close temporal proximity, forming unique patterns and relationships of interest. However, the task of finding these early signs, which are in the form of atypical behavioral patterns, becomes more challenging when behaviors of multiple children at different ages need to be compared with each other in search of generalizable patterns. The ability to visually explore the temporal relationships of behaviors, including flexible redefinition of closeness, over multiple social interaction sessions with children of different ages, can make such knowledge extraction easier. We have designed a visualization tool called TipoVis that helps psychology researchers visually explore the temporal patterns of social and communicative behaviors. We present two case studies to show how TipoVis helped two researchers derive new understandings of their data.