English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Free Plan

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Background and aims   Prior work has examined how children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder who are minimally verbal use their spoken language abilities during interactions with others. However, social communication includes other aspects beyond speech. To our knowledge, no studies have examined how minimally verbal children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder are using their gestural communication during social interactions. Such work can provide important insights into how gestures may complement their spoken language abilities.Methods   Fifty minimally verbal children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder participated ( M age  = 12.41 years; 38 males). Gestural communication was coded from the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule. Children ( n = 25) and adolescents ( n = 25) were compared on their production of gestures, gesture–speech combinations, and communicative functions. Communicative functions were also assessed by the type of communication modality: gesture, speech, and gesture–speech to examine the range of communicative functions across different modalities of communication. To explore the role gestures may play the relation between speech utterances and gestural production was investigated.Results   Analyses revealed that (1) minimally verbal children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder did not differ in their total number of gestures. The most frequently produced gesture across children and adolescents was a reach gesture, followed by a point gesture (deictic gesture), and then conventional gestures. However, adolescents produced more gesture–speech combinations (reinforcing gesture-speech combinations) and displayed a wider range of communicative functions. (2) Overlap was found in the types of communicative functions expressed across different communication modalities. However, requests were conveyed via gesture more frequently compared to speech or gesture–speech. In contrast, dis/agree/acknowledging and responding to a question posed by the conversational partner was expressed more frequently via speech compared to gesture or gesture–speech. (3) The total number of gestures was negatively associated with total speech utterances after controlling for chronological age, receptive communication ability, and nonverbal IQ.Conclusions   Adolescents may be employing different communication strategies to maintain the conversational exchange and to further clarify the message they want to convey to the conversational partner. Although overlap occurred in communicative functions across gesture, speech, and gesture–speech, nuanced differences emerged in how often they were expressed across different modalities of communication. Given their speech production abilities, gestures may play a compensatory role for some individuals with autism spectrum disorder who are minimally verbal.Implications   Findings underscore the importance of assessing multiple modalities of communication to provide a fuller picture of their social communication abilities. Our results identified specific communicative strengths and areas for growth that can be targeted and expanded upon within gesture and speech to optimize social communication development.

autism and developmental language impairments

How do minimally verbal children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder use communicative gestures to complement their spoken language abilities?