Do Spoken Vocabulary and Gestural Production Distinguish Children with Transient Language Delay from Children Who Will Show Developmental Language Disorder? A Pilot Study

Pasquale Rinaldi, Arianna Bello, Francesca Romana Lasorsa and Maria Cristina Caselli
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Pasquale Rinaldi: Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council, Via Nomentana, 56, 00161 Rome, Italy
Arianna Bello: Department of Education, Roma Tre University, Via Castro Pretorio, 20, 00185 Rome, Italy
Francesca Romana Lasorsa: Asl Roma 1 TSMREE 13, Via Domenico Silveri, 8, 00165 Rome, Italy
Maria Cristina Caselli: Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council, Via Nomentana, 56, 00161 Rome, Italy

IJERPH, 2022, vol. 19, issue 7, 1-18

Abstract: The literature on the role of gestures in children with language delay (LD) is partial and controversial. The present study explores gestural production and modality of expression in children with LD and semantic and temporal relationships between gestures and words in gesture + word combinations. Thirty-three children participated (mean age, 26 months), who were recruited through a screening programme for LD. Cognitive skills, lexical abilities, and the use of spontaneous gestures in a naming task were evaluated when the children were 32 months old. When the children were 78 months old, their parents were interviewed to collect information about an eventual diagnosis of developmental language disorder (DLD). According to these data, the children fell into three groups: children with typical development ( n = 13), children with LD who did not show DLD (transient LD; n = 9), and children with LD who showed DLD ( n = 11). No significant differences emerged between the three groups for cognitive and lexical skills (comprehension and production), for number of gestures spontaneously produced, and for the sematic relationships between gestures and words. Differences emerged in the modality of expression, where children with transient LD produced more unimodal gestural utterances than typical-development children, and in the temporal relationships between gestures and words, where the children who would show DLD provided more frequent representational gestures before the spoken answer than typical-development children. We suggest a different function for gestures in children with T-LD, who used representational gestures to replace the spoken word they were not yet able to produce, and in children with LD-DLD, who used representational gestures to access spoken words.

Keywords: gesture; language delay; developmental language disorder; picture naming game; MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventory; representational gesture; temporal synchrony; semantic synchrony (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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