고기능 자폐스펙트럼장애 유무에 따른 학령기 아동의 제스처 유형 및 특성에 관한 기초연구

Abstract

Children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (HFA) have difficulties in expressing verbal ideas in accordance with various and elaborate gestures because of their well- known pragmatic problems. Since gestures are closely related to speech for their important role in providing additional information, it is also important to look at how gestures and speech work together to express meaning. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the characteristics of various gestures that children with high functioning autism spectrum disorders (HFA) incorporate when they express their ideas. The participants consisted of 7 HFA children and 7 age-matched typically developing (TD) children. The experiment task was to retell a story after watching an animated cartoon. Three questions were given in order to induce more gestures from the participants. While the participants were retelling the story and answering the questions, their speech and gestures were video-recorded for data collection. The gestures were classified into two categories; one was based on the content of information expressed and the other was based on the degree of congruence between speech and gestures. The category based on information content classified gestures into four types; iconic gestures, deictic gestures, emblem gestures, and beat gestures. The category based on the degree of congruency divided gestures into four different subcategories; redundant gestures, additional gestures, disambiguate gestures, and others. The gestures were collected and analyzed according to the rate of each gesture category and type. Mann-Whitney U Test was performed to determine if the differences between two groups according to gesture types were significant.. Spearman correlation coefficient was used to find out the correlation between gestures. As a result, in gestures according to the degree of information the HFA group mostly used iconic gestures while emblem gestures were not used. It was found that the HFA group used gestures to describe the movements or characteristics of the characters which allowed them to easily recall those features when retelling the story. In addition, since this experiment required children to retell the story, it seemed that there was a limit to the use of socially defined emblem gestures. In terms of gestures categorized according to the degree of congruency disambiguate gestures showed significantly lower usage. This HFA group seems to have low usage because they cannot modify their gestures to take into account the listener’s perspective. HFA group used redundant gestures more than TD group. This result reveals that children with HFA group supplement intentions through gestures since they lack the ability of effectively processing stored meanings and functionally expressing their ideas through words. In conclusion, based on the results of this study, it is suggested that identifying and intervention various gestures in which HFA children show strength is a efficient method for improving pragmatic ability. Therefore, it is essential to carefully examine the use of gestures when treating HFA children.