Gesture Production in a Story Recalling Task of Preschool Children with Specific Language Impairment

Abstract

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to investigate the gesture production characteristics of Korean preschool children with specific language impairment (SLI) through the task of recalling a story after seeing a wordless-cartoon.Methods: The subjects of this study were sixteen children aged 5-6 years with SLI, 16 children with typical development (TD) matched by their chronological age (CA) and 16 children with typical development matched by their language age (LA). To compare gesture production characteristics of Children with SLI, wordless-cartoons and 5 facilitative questions were used.Results: First, there were significant differences between the SLI group and CA matched group in deictic gesture and representational gesture. However, there was no significant the difference in conventional gesture. Second, as a result of examining difference in proportion by modality of expression among those groups, there were significant differences between the SLI group and the CA matched group in spoken language and coverbal gesture. Third, there was no significant difference in the concordance rate of coverbal gesture.Conclusion: Children with SLI were found to produce gestures at a higher frequency than TD children, but there was no difference in the concordance rate of coverbal gestures. Thus, this study suggest that intervention is necessary to induce children with SLI to use spoken language and gestures together in order to effectively improve their expressive language ability.