Pantomime Production by People With Aphasia: What Are Influencing Factors?

PURPOSE: The present article aimed to inform clinical practice on whether people with aphasia (PWA) deploy pantomime techniques similarly to participants without brain damage (PWBD) and if not, what factors influence these differences. METHOD: We compared 38 PWA to 20 PWBD in their use of 6 representation techniques (handling, enact, object, shape, deictic, and other) when pantomiming objects, and determined whether PWA used the same defaults as PWBD. We assessed the influence of (non-)dominant arm use, ideomotor apraxia, semantic processing, aphasia severity, and oral naming. RESULTS: PWA used various pantomime techniques. Enact, deictic, and other were used infrequently. No differences were found for the use of shape techniques, but PWA used fewer handling and object techniques than PWBD and they did not use these for the same objects as PWBD did. No influence was found for (non-)dominant arm use. All other variables correlated with the use of handling, object, and defaults. CONCLUSION: In our study, PWA were able to use various pantomime techniques. As a group, they used these techniques differently from PWBD and relied more heavily on the use of shape techniques. This was not influenced by a hemiparesis, but seemed dependent on semantic processing. Clinical implications are discussed.

Should pantomime and gesticulation be assessed separately for their comprehensibility in aphasia? A case study.

BACKGROUND: Gesticulation (gestures accompanying speech) and pantomime (gestures in the absence of speech) can each be comprehensible. Little is known about the differences between these two gesture modes in people with aphasia. AIMS: To discover whether there are differences in the communicative use of gesticulation and pantomime in QH, a person with severe fluent aphasia. METHODS & PROCEDURES: QH performed two tasks: naming objects and retelling a story. He did this once in a verbal condition (enabling gesticulation) and once in a pantomime condition. For both conditions, the comprehensibility of gestures was analysed in a forced-choice task by naïve judges. Secondly, a comparison was made between QH and healthy controls for the representation techniques used. OUTCOMES & RESULTS: Pantomimes produced by QH for naming objects were significantly more comprehensible than chance, whereas his gesticulation was not. For retelling a story the opposite pattern was found. When naming objects QH gesticulated much more than did healthy controls. His pantomimes for this task were simpler than those used by the control group. For retelling a story no differences were found. CONCLUSIONS & IMPLICATIONS: Although QH did not make full use of each gesture modes' potential, both did contribute to QH's comprehensibility. Crucially, the benefits of each mode differed across tasks. This implies that both gesture modes should be taken into account separately in models of speech and gesture production and in clinical practice for different communicative settings.

Gesturing by speakers with aphasia: how does it compare?

PURPOSE: To study the independence of gesture and verbal language production. The authors assessed whether gesture can be semantically compensatory in cases of verbal language impairment and whether speakers with aphasia and control participants use similar depiction techniques in gesture. METHOD: The informativeness of gesture was assessed in 3 forced-choice studies, in which raters assessed the topic of the speaker's message in video clips of 13 speakers with moderate aphasia and 12 speakers with severe aphasia, who were performing a communication test (the Scenario Test). Both groups were compared and contrasted with 17 control participants, who either were or were not allowed to communicate verbally. In addition, the representation techniques used in gesture were analyzed. RESULTS: Gestures produced by speakers with more severe aphasia were less informative than those by speakers with moderate aphasia, yet they were not necessarily uninformative. Speakers with more severe aphasia also tended to use fewer representation techniques (mostly relying on outlining gestures) in co-speech gesture than control participants, who were asked to use gesture instead of speech. It is important to note that limb apraxia may be a mediating factor here. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that in aphasia, gesture tends to degrade with verbal language. This may imply that the processes underlying verbal language and co-speech gesture production, although partly separate, are closely linked.