Looking at gesture: The reciprocal influence between gesture and conversation

Area of Science:

• Neurolinguistics
• Communication Sciences and Disorders
• Psycholinguistics

Background:

• Limited research exists on group communication treatments for individuals with aphasia.
• Existing studies suggest that gesture aids conversation by supporting recipient design, reducing linguistic load, and serving an affiliative function.
• The relationship between gesture use and gestural capacity in aphasia has not been extensively studied.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine patterns of co-speech gesture in authentic conversations among people with aphasia.
• To identify the functions of gesture use for participants during group conversation.
• To investigate changes in gesture use over time and its relationship with gestural ability.

Main Methods:

• An embedded case-study design utilizing Conversation Analysis (CA).
• Three participants underwent a semester of group and individual conversation-based treatment (Facilitating Authentic Conversation).
• Four treatment conversations were transcribed and analyzed for multimodal communication and gesture patterns.

Main Results:

• Participants used gesture for social and linguistic functions, including turn-allocation, repair, emphasis, and affiliation.
• All participants showed an increased rate of gesture per turn and greater use of gesture for conversation repair.
• Increased gesture use correlated with improved pantomime scores on the Porch Index of Communicative Ability (PICA).

Conclusions:

• Individuals with aphasia demonstrated enhanced gesture use for diverse communicative purposes following treatment.
• Improved gestural processing was observed after a semester of conversation-based group treatment.
• Gesture effectively supports the repair of conversation breakdown in people with aphasia.