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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 20, 2025

Author Spotlight: Deciphering the Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms of Gesture in Communication

Author Spotlight: Deciphering the Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms of Gesture in Communication

Published on: January 26, 2024

Prosody and gestures help pragmatic processing in children with Developmental Language Disorder.

Albert Giberga¹, Ernesto Guerra², Nadia Ahufinger¹

¹Estudis de Psicologia i Ciències de l'Educació, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain.

Journal of Communication Disorders

|March 26, 2025

Summary

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) benefit from prosodic and multimodal cues for understanding pragmatic meanings. Multimodal enhancement aids complex meanings, especially in older children with DLD.

Keywords:

Developmental Language Disorder Gestures Pragmatic development Prosody

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Area of Science:

Developmental Psychology
Linguistics
Speech and Language Therapy

Background:

Typically developing children use prosody and gestures for pragmatic understanding.
Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) often struggle with language structure and pragmatics.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how prosodic and gestural cues aid pragmatic meaning processing in children with DLD.
To compare cue benefits for less complex (interrogative) versus more complex (indirect requests) meanings.
To examine age-related differences in cue utilization for children with DLD.

Main Methods:

Two visual-world eye-tracking tasks involving 34 children with DLD and 45 typically developing controls (ages 5-10).
Manipulation of prosodic, multimodal, and no-enhancement cues for pragmatic meanings.
Analysis of eye gaze data to assess target image preference and interpretation bias.

Main Results:

All children improved comprehension with prosodic and multimodal cues for simpler meanings.
Younger children with DLD showed lower accuracy despite cue enhancement.
Multimodal cues particularly aided older children with DLD in processing complex meanings.
Children with DLD exhibited less clear target preference with prosodic/bodily cues but multimodal cues reduced literal bias for indirect requests.

Conclusions:

Prosodic and bodily cues are crucial for processing pragmatic meanings of varying complexity, especially for children with DLD.
Multimodal cueing offers significant support for children with DLD, particularly for more complex pragmatic tasks.
Findings inform communication strategies for professionals working with children with DLD.