Communicative Gesture
Almost everyone gestures while speaking, and persons with aphasia gesture even more!
We tend to study iconic gestures, which look like the thing they’re describing (cupping your hands together to make a circle, meaning “ball”)
We want to understand how gestures improve how we communicate
People tend to gesture more when they’re using spatial language, like telling a “how to” story
Persons with aphasia tend to use gesture to supplement (add to, disambiguate, or replace) their speech more often than persons without aphasia
We have collaborated to create some assessments of communication that look at gesture and not just speech
An international survey of speech therapists indicates that, while people want to evaluate and treat gesture, they often don’t — for a variety of reasons
