Use of co-verbal gestures during word-finding difficulty among Cantonese speakers with fluent aphasia and unimpaired controls

ABSTRACT

Background: Co-verbal gestures refer to hand or arm movements made during speaking. Spoken language and gestures have been shown to be tightly integrated in human communication.

Aims: The present study investigated whether co-verbal gesture use was associated with lexical retrieval in connected speech in unimpaired speakers and persons with aphasia (PWA).

Methods & Procedures: Narrative samples of 58 fluent PWA and 58 control speakers were extracted from Cantonese AphasiaBank. Based on the indicators of word-finding difficulty (WFD) in connected speech adapted from previous research and a gesture annotation system with independent coding of gesture forms and functions, all WFD instances were identified. The presence and type of gestures accompanying each incident of WFD were then annotated. Finally, whether the use of gesture was accompanied by resolution of WFD (i.e., the corresponding target word could be retrieved) was examined.

Outcomes & Results: Employment of co-verbal gesture did not seem to be related to the success of word retrieval. PWA’s naming ability at single-word level and their overall language ability (as reflected by the aphasia quotient of the Cantonese version of the Western Aphasia Battery) were found to be the two strongest predictors of success rate of resolving WFD.

Conclusions: The Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis highlighting the facilitative functions of iconic and metaphoric gestures in lexical retrieval was not supported. Challenges in conducting research related to WFD, and the clinical implications in gesture-based language intervention for PWA were discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Co-verbal gestures
• discourse
• lexical retrieval
• word-finding difficulty
• Cantonese

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the invaluable contribution of the people living with aphasia and control speakers who participated. This study is part of a larger investigation supported by the National Institutes of Health [project number: NIH-R01-DC010398, Anthony Pak-Hin Kong (PI) and Sam-Po Law (Co-I)]. Special thanks to the staff members in the following organizations (in alphabetical order) for their help in subject recruitment: Christian Family Service Center (Kwun Tong Community Rehabilitation Day Center), Community Rehabilitation Network of The Hong Kong Society for Rehabilitation, Internal Aphasia Clinic at the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Stroke Association, Lee Quo Wei Day Rehabilitation and Care Centre of The Hong Kong Society for Rehabilitation, and Self Help Group for the Brain Damage.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The degree of treatment effects might depend on whether a PWA’s WFD is phonologically or semantically based (e.g., Rose & Sussmilch, 2008).

2. For details of the database (e.g., participant characteristics, language and video sample setup, or behavioral and/or language test results), refer to Kong et al. (2017) and Kong and Law (in press).

3. The number of gestures might vary from zero to the number of gestures identified.

4. A careful post hoc examination of the raw data revealed that disagreements on WFD identification between raters mainly occurred in ungrammatical, slurred, or poorly articulated utterances.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [NIH-R01-DC010398].