Pantomiming what you cannot say: a study on the influence of a semantic disorder on the ability to compensate for speech loss with the use of pantomimes / Karin Van Nispen

Pantomiming what you cannot say: a study on the influence of a semantic disorder on the ability to compensate for speech loss with the use of pantomimes / Karin Van Nispen. In "Perspectives neuropsycholinguistiques sur l'aphasie - NeuroPsychoLinguistic Perspectives on Aphasia", colloque international organisé par l'Unité de Recherche Interdisciplinaire Octogone de l'Université Toulouse II-Le Mirail (France). Toulouse, 21-23 juin 2012. 

Gestures can convey meaning in co-occurrence as well as in absence of speech (e.g. Krauss, Chen, & Gottesman, 2000). For people with severe aphasia gesturing could therefore potentially be a good strategy to compensate for their speech loss. However, a study by Mol, Krahmer & van de Sandt-Koenderman (2011), shows that gestures of aphasic people are less comprehensible than those of healthy controls. This supports the view that language and gesturing are closely related processes (de Ruiter, 2000; McNeill & Duncan, 1998). Following this hypothesis, one would expect people with aphasia to show difficulties in gesturing. However, aphasic patients typically show very different linguistic disorders. Therefore, it is difficult to make general claims about their ability to gesture. Possibly, there is a relation between specific linguistic disorders and this gesture ability. De Ruiter (2000) proposes that language and gesture are linked in the conceptualization stage of language production, a stage which involves semantic processing. Following De Ruiter’s hypothesis (de Ruiter, 2000), one would therefore expect aphasic patients with a semantic disorder to show a deficit in gesturing. 

The current study aims at analyzing the influence of a semantic disorder on the ability of aphasic patients to compensate for their speech loss with the use of pantomimes. Our findings will give new insights into the gesture ability of people with aphasia. This can be used in clinical practice for communication and therapy advice. Furthermore, this study gives a more theoretical insight in the relation between language and gesturing. 

We conduct two experiments. In the first experiment, a healthy control group and two groups of aphasic people, one with and one without a semantic disorder, are asked to name pictures of objects from the Boston Naming Task (Kaplan, Goodglass, & Weintraub, 1983). They have to do this both verbally and with the use of pantomimes. We compare the techniques used by each group to depict objects in pantomime (e.g. pretending to handle an object or outlining its shape). The comprehensibility of the pantomimes is assessed in a second experiment. In a perception task, we show video clips from the first experiment to students who have to determine (in a forced choice task) what the person in the video clip is trying to express. 

This study is currently being conducted. At the conference we will present a comparison of the comprehensibility of the spoken utterances versus the comprehensibility of the used pantomimes, for all three groups. This may reveal to what extent aphasic patients are able to compensate for their speech loss with the use of pantomimes, and whether this differs for people with and without a semantic disorder.