Atypicalities of Gesture Form and Function in Autistic Adults.
A de Marchena, E S Kim, A Bagdasarov, J Parish-Morris, B B Maddox, E S Brodkin, R T Schultz
Author Information
A de Marchena: Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences, University of the Sciences, 600 S 43rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA. a.demarchena@usciences.edu. ORCID
E S Kim: The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Center for Autism Research, Roberts Center for Pediatric Research, 2716 South Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA.
A Bagdasarov: The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Center for Autism Research, Roberts Center for Pediatric Research, 2716 South Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA.
J Parish-Morris: The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Center for Autism Research, Roberts Center for Pediatric Research, 2716 South Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA.
B B Maddox: The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Center for Autism Research, Roberts Center for Pediatric Research, 2716 South Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA.
E S Brodkin: The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Center for Autism Research, Roberts Center for Pediatric Research, 2716 South Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA.
R T Schultz: The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Center for Autism Research, Roberts Center for Pediatric Research, 2716 South Street, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA.
While well-represented on clinical measures, co-speech gesture production has never been formally studied in autistic adults. Twenty-one verbally fluent autistic adults and 21 typically developing controls engaged in a controlled conversational task. Group differences were observed in both semantic/pragmatic and motoric features of spontaneously produced co-speech gestures. Autistic adults prioritized different functions of co-speech gesture. Specifically, they used gesture more than controls to facilitate conversational turn-taking, demonstrating a novel nonverbal strategy for regulating conversational dynamics. Autistic adults were more likely to gesture unilaterally than bilaterally, a motoric feature of gesture that was individually associated with autism symptoms. Co-speech gestures may provide a link between nonverbal communication symptoms and known differences in motor performance in autism.
