Beat Gestures Improve Language Comprehension in Chinese Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders.

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.