Gesture serves a function of expressing communication intention and complementing weak spoken language. Children with disabilities who have difficulty communicating also use gesture to complement their spoken language, as it supports them to express t...
Gesture serves a function of expressing communication intention and complementing weak spoken language. Children with disabilities who have difficulty communicating also use gesture to complement their spoken language, as it supports them to express their intention. Thus, gesture can be a goal of language intervention for children with disabilities.
Children with specific language impairment use more gestures than children with typical development because they have difficulties in express language and finding appropriate words. They use gestures to complement their difficulties in expressive language skills. As such, it is important to understand how their gesture production characteristics differ from children with typical development. The purpose of this study was to investigate the gesture production characteristics of Korean preschool children with specific language impairment through the task of recalling a story after seeing a wordless-cartoon.
The subjects of this study were sixteen children aged 5∼6 years with specific language impairment, sixteen children with typical development matched by their chronological age and sixteen children with typical development matched by their language age. To compare the differences in frequency of production by gestures types, proportion by modality of expression, and concordance rate of coverbal gestures of Children with specific language impairment, the researcher analyzed the gestures that child produced while recalling a story. The results of this study are as follows.
First, as a result of examining the difference in frequency of production by gestures types among those groups, there were significant differences between the specific language impairment group and chronological age matched group in deictic gesture and representational gesture. However, there was no significant the difference in conventional gesture. Second, as a result of examining difference in proportion by modality of expression(gesture, spoken language, coverbal gesture) among those groups, there were significant differences between the specific language impairment group and the chronological age matched group in spoken language and coverbal gesture. However, there was no significant difference in gesture. Third, as a result of examining the difference among those groups in the concordance rate of coverbal gesture, the highest concordance rate was found in the chronological age matched group, followed by the language age matched group, then the specific language impairment group. however, these differences were not statistically significant.
Therefore, this study showed that children with specific language impairment had a higher frequency of deictic and representational gestures than children with typical development, and more total gestures than typically developing children. In addition, children with specific language impairment showed the highest proportion of coverbal gesture in modality of expression. From these results, it may be interpreted that children with specific language impairment use gestures more than typically developing children because they rely on gestures to complement for their difficulties in expressive language ability. This suggests that to achive efficient intervention for children with specific language impairment, the use of spoken language and gestures all together may be an intervention strategy to improve their expressive language skills. In this study, children with specific language impairment were found to produce gestures at a higher frequency than typically developing children, but there was no difference in concordance rate of coverbal gestures. These results can be explained that ability of spoken language and gesture combinations did not differ significantly across children with specific language impairment and typically developing children. The results of this study suggest that intervention is necessary to induce children with a specific language impairment to use spoken language and gestures together in order to effectively improve their expressive language ability.
In conclusion, this study suggests that using spoken language and gestures rather than simply focusing on spoken language is a more efficient method of language intervention for children with specific language impairment to improve their expressive language skills. It is clinically meaningful to suggest that this can be a teaching strategy.