Li Shifeng, Zhang Yuhan, Wang Li, Li Jiayue
School of Psychology, Northwest Normal University, Lanzhou, China.
Key Laboratory of Behavioral and Mental Health of Gansu, Lanzhou, China.
J Autism Dev Disord. 2025 May 29. doi: 10.1007/s10803-025-06892-y.
The present study investigated the role of beat gestures in language comprehension among children with autism spectrum disorders. Twenty-six children with autism and 26 age-matched typically developing children participated in a language comprehension task. The task involved watching video recordings of dialogues presented in three conditions: speech-only, speech with beat gestures, and speech with meaningless gestures. The study recorded the accuracy and reaction time of children's responses, as well as their eye movement patterns, during the task. While there were no significant differences in the accuracy and reaction time across the three conditions for the typically developing children, the autistic children showed significantly improved performance in the beat gesture condition compared to the other two conditions. Additionally, eye-movement data revealed that typically developing children displayed an attentional bias towards the face in all conditions. However, autistic children demonstrated a greater bias in gaze towards the hand location in the gesture condition. The results suggest that beat gestures enhance language comprehension in autistic children by emphasizing prosodic and discourse-pragmatic cues. These findings offer valuable insights for language rehabilitation training practices for Chinese children with autism.
本研究调查了节拍手势在自闭症谱系障碍儿童语言理解中的作用。26名自闭症儿童和26名年龄匹配的发育正常儿童参与了一项语言理解任务。该任务包括观看在三种条件下呈现的对话视频记录：仅语音、带有节拍手势的语音以及带有无意义手势的语音。研究记录了儿童在任务过程中的反应准确性和反应时间，以及他们的眼动模式。虽然发育正常的儿童在三种条件下的反应准确性和反应时间没有显著差异，但与其他两种条件相比，自闭症儿童在节拍手势条件下的表现有显著改善。此外，眼动数据显示，发育正常的儿童在所有条件下都对面部表现出注意力偏向。然而，自闭症儿童在手势条件下对手部位置的注视偏向更大。结果表明，节拍手势通过强调韵律和语篇语用线索来提高自闭症儿童的语言理解能力。这些发现为中国自闭症儿童的语言康复训练实践提供了有价值的见解。
