The relationship between speech and gestures in persons with aphasia: Evidence from the Czech perspective

Abstract

In my research, I replicate two fundamental hypotheses established by Jakob et al. (2011): 1) Persons with aphasia (PWA) produce more gestures than healthy control persons (HCP) during interpretation of texts; 2) The more speech-restricted a person with aphasia is, the more gestures he/she produces during the interpretation of a text.

I work with 6 persons with diagnosed aphasia and 10 healthy control persons (or persons with no evident speech deficiency). From a methodological point of view, I point out the necessity to include a description of non-verbal elements in language description and, at the same time, to describe the data of the damage in persons with aphasia. I also introduce some possible perspectives for exploring the categories and the extent of speech damage in persons with aphasia and various ways in which they compensate for verbal deficiency with the aid of gestures. From the viewpoint of data processing methods, on the one hand, I explore the speech parameters: among others, quantity of words, and, on the other hand, the gesture parameters: quantity of gestures, diversity of gestures, etc.

I find that Czech aphasic persons do use gestures to support their restricted verbal production and to substitute for verbal production where they do not have access to any given lexical items. My data also correlate with the general assumptions on speech production when considering different types of aphasia.