Presentation
Search Abstracts | Symposia | Slide Sessions | Poster Sessions | Lightning Talks
Factors influencing the effect of gesture on lexical retrieval in aphasia.
Poster E55 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Isobel Chick1, Amy Lebkuecher2,4, Laurel J. Buxbaum2, Yumeng Marine Wang1, Anna Krason3, Shauna Zodrow2, Erica Middleton3, H. Branch Coslett4, Gabriella Vigliocco1; 1Language and Cognition Lab, UCL, 2Cognition and Action Laboratory, Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute, Philadelphia, USA, 3Language and Learning Laboratory, Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute, Philadelphia, USA, 4Laboratory for Cognition and Neural Stimulation, University of Pennsylvania
Anomia, or word-finding difficulties, is common in post-stroke aphasia. Some individuals with aphasia (PWA) benefit from observing meaningful gestures alongside speech, improving naming (e.g. Bonifazi et al., 2013; Murteira & Nickels, 2020). However, outcomes for PWA vary and, crucially, the role of individual differences and lexical factors in moderating any gesture effect is uncertain, making it challenging to design personalized rehabilitation approaches. This study aimed to investigate whether gesture observation facilitated naming in face-to-face interaction and whether any effect was impacted by lexical variables. We hypothesized that meaningful co-speech gestures used by interlocutors would facilitate later lexical retrieval in PWA, leading to improved naming by enhancing semantic activation. We predicted that PWA would exhibit higher naming accuracy when interlocuters used co-speech gestures than when they did not. Further, we expected interactions between gesture condition, word length and lexical frequency, with PWA predicted to name longer and less frequent words more accurately when gestures were present. We recruited 28 English-speaking PWA with mild-moderate aphasia (24 males, 4 females) from the UK and USA (mean WAB-R Aphasia Quotient: 77.8, SD: 14.1). Participants played an interactive picture naming card game with researchers, ‘Go Fish!’, where players took turns asking each other for cards depicting everyday objects and actions. In half of trials, researchers used gestures semantically-related to the target words when asking for cards; in the other half, researchers did not gesture. Gesture presence/absence was blocked and counterbalanced. Naming accuracy was measured based on participants correctly naming the images on their cards in subsequent trials. Only trials where researchers had previously named the target words prior to PWA’s attempts at naming were included in the analysis. 945 observations were included in a logistic mixed effects regression analysis. Preliminary results indicated no significant effect of gesture presence/absence on naming. However, very considerable inter-subject variability was observed, such that some PWA showed gesture benefit (range 5%-48% improvement with gestures) while others performed more poorly with gestures (range 2%-48% decrement with gestures). Moreover, a significant interaction between gesture condition and word length (no. phones) was observed (p < 0.001). Contrary to predictions, we found no significant effect of gesture condition on naming accuracy or interaction with lexical frequency. At the individual level, however, we observed several PWA whose naming appeared to benefit from gesture. Moreover, a significant interaction was observed between word length and gesture condition: longer words were named less accurately overall but accuracy improved when gestures were present, indicating that gesture presence ameliorated the effect of word length. Limitations of the study included a small sample size excluding PWA with severe aphasia. Our preliminary findings suggest gesture observation interacts with other factors, including lexical variables, to facilitate naming in PWA. Due to high variability in gesture response among participants, we will collect additional data to explore how individual differences in aphasia severity, lesion characteristics, limb apraxia severity, semantic access and cognitive functioning moderate gesture benefit. These findings may have important implications for the development of personalized rehabilitation approaches.
Topic Areas: Disorders: Acquired, Speech-Language Treatment