Gestures and speech rhythms can help improve comprehension in children with language difficulties

Developmental language disorder (DLD) affects around two children in each class. It hinders their acquisition and use of language, even if they do not have other auditory, intellectual or neurological problems, and are only affected in this aspect of language. A study led by researchers at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) has shown that aids such as gestures and the rhythmic and melodic aspects of speech – prosody – are key to helping these children achieve a better understanding of oral language (pragmatic comprehension).

Children with DLD have difficulty processing sentence structure, and understanding word combinations and parts of words. The study has shown that two communication cues – intonation and gestures – are also helpful for children with typical language development, but “it’s especially useful to apply them in school environments with children with DLD, where teachers and speech therapists can deliberately incorporate gestures and intonation to facilitate children’s pragmatic comprehension. These strategies can be used to improve everyday interactions and learning activities,” explained Albert Giberga, doctoral student and researcher in the Cognition and Language Research Group (GRECIL), part of the UOC’s Digital Health, Health and Well-being Research Unit. The research, which has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, also involved Nadia Ahufinger, Alfonso Igualada and Núria Esteve-Gibert, from the UOC’s Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences and members of the GRECIL group, alongside Mari Aguilera, from the University of Barcelona, and Ernesto Guerra, from the University of Chile.

The article detailing the results of the study, published as open access in the Journal of Communication Disorders, explains that prosody alone facilitates the understanding of simpler meanings, such as questions, but when the meaning is more complex, such as when indirect requests are made, gestural cues play a decisive role. “Using gestures is also useful for typically developing children, but the benefit is more pronounced in children with language difficulties,” said Giberga. 

Inclining the head and using hand gestures to communicate more complex meanings

The study involved 45 typically developing children and 34 children with developmental language disorders between the ages of 5 and 10, all bilingual Catalan and Spanish speakers living in Catalonia. They participated in two experiments in which they saw and heard a story while sitting in front of a screen. Apart from analyzing their answers, the study also used eye-tracking,which recorded where the children looked when they heard and saw a word or phrase. This technique allows us to understand what people are thinking in real time and how they are processing information. 

In the first experiment, the children had to understand whether or not the speaker was asking a question, and it was observed that comprehension was easier with just prosody (the speech patterns). In the second experiment, the children had to understand more complicated and non-literal meanings, such as indirect requests. For example, when someone says “it’s cold here”, implying that a window should be closed. The results showed that, when meaning requires inference, gestures can be decisive in facilitating understanding in groups with linguistic difficulties.

We’ve known for decades that speech prosody is important for understanding language, and more recently there has also been a growing interest in other cues, such as gestures, which were previously considered external to language. There’s an increasing amount of evidence that they also play a key role, especially in understanding complex messages, because they help us to remove ambiguityand clarify meaning.”

Albert Giberga, doctoral student and researcher in the Cognition and Language Research Group

Among the gestures used were up and down movements of the head and raised eyebrows, applied in the first experiment, and others such as tilting the head and gesturing with both hands towards the speaker, used in the second experiment, which are frequent when these meanings are expressed in Catalan. To find out which gestures are used most, the researchers recorded 10 adults indirectly asking a family member or friend to give them something or do something, and saw which gestures were used most often by Catalan speakers. 

Giberga believes that “it’s more than likely that the results can be generalized to other cultural environments, given that communication mechanisms based on prosody and gestures are universal in many languages, but research would have to be conducted in other linguistic contexts to confirm this”.

Next steps: applying these tools to children with autism

Having obtained these results when looking at developmental language disorder, the researchers are now studying the role of multimodal cues, i.e. messages that incorporate both speech prosody and gestures, in the comprehension of children with autism. Oral language comprehension is one of the linguistic components affected most in these children, but they also have difficulties processing auditory and visual information. The researchers will therefore evaluate what type of cue, whether prosodic or gestural, is best for children with autism. “In addition to applying the same experimental tests to children with autism, we’re interested in knowing what happens in communication between adults and children in everyday situations, where parents of children with autism apply these strategies to communicate with their children,” Giberga explained.