Abstract
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or with Down syndrome (DS) show diagnosis-specific differences from typically developing (TD) children in gesture production. We asked whether these differences reflect the differences in parental gesture input. Our systematic observations of 23 children with ASD and 23 with DS (Mages = 2;6)—compared to 23 TD children (Mage = 1;6) similar in expressive vocabulary—showed that across groups children and parents produced similar types of gestures and gesture-speech combinations. However, only children—but not their parents—showed diagnosis-specific variability in how often they produced each type of gesture and gesture-speech combination. These findings suggest that, even though parents model gestures similarly, the amount with which children produce each type largely reflects diagnosis-specific abilities.
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Notes
The three groups differed, however, in their standardized assessment of early cognitive ability, χ 2(2) = 42.48, p < .001 (Mullen Scales of Early Learning; Mullen (1995); MTD = 100.61 [SD = 12.24], MASD = 57.61 [SD = 12.16], MDS = 54.87 [SD = 5.67])—with reliable differences between TD children compared both to children with ASD and children with DS (Bonferroni, ps <.001). The standard scores on subscales of the Mullen were MTD = 47.70 (SD = 8.08), MASD = 23.76 (SD = 7.58), MDS = 24.22 (SD = 6.04) for visual reception, MTD = 51.17 (SD = 6.71), MASD = 24.67 (SD = 7.84), MDS = 22.04 (SD = 4.98) for fine motor, MTD = 49.61 (SD = 5.4), MASD = 27.14 (SD = 8.11), MDS = 26.13 (SD = 5.20) for expressive language, and MTD = 52.65 (SD = 10.55), MASD = 27.62 (SD = 9.65), MDS = 25.04 (SD = 7.28) for receptive language.
The patterns of gesture production of the 69 children in this study were reported in earlier work. This earlier work focused exclusively on the amount and types of gestures children produced and how it related to children’s emerging vocabularies in speech (Özçalışkan et al. 2016a, b, 2017; Dimitrova et al. 2016).
We also examined whether each child’s use of gesture or gesture + speech varied systematically with the parent’s production. The relation between children’s and parents’ overall production of gestures (TD: r s = .31, p = .15; ASD: r s = .06, p = .80) and gesture-speech combinations (TD: r s = .24, p = .28; ASD: r s = .04, p = .85; DS: r s = .27, p = .21) did not reveal any significant relations—with the only exception of gesture production in the DS group (r s = .57, p = .005).
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by Grants from NSF (BCS 1251337, Özçalışkan), NIH (R01 HD035612, Adamson), and Swiss NSF (PBLAP1_142782, Dimitrova). We thank Jhonelle Bailey and Lauren Schmuck for their help in gesture coding and Katharine Suma and Claire Cusak for their assistance with compiling data summaries. We also thank the reviewers and the editor for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.
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ŞÖ and LBA contributed to the study concept and design. LBA supervised the use of the archive of video records and verbal transcripts. ŞÖ supervised the coding of the gestures and performed the statistical analysis. ND and SB participated in gesture coding, reliability assessments and compilation of data summaries. ŞÖ drafted the initial manuscript and all four authors provided critical revisions and approved the final version of the manuscript for submission.
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Özçalışkan, Ş., Adamson, L.B., Dimitrova, N. et al. Do Parents Model Gestures Differently When Children’s Gestures Differ?. J Autism Dev Disord 48, 1492–1507 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3411-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3411-y