Chick, Isobel Angharad;
(2025)
Gesture in aphasia: effects on auditory comprehension, speech production and communicative effectiveness.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
Communication is multimodal. Humans dynamically use multiple channels seamlessly – speech, gesture, eye-gaze, facial expressions and more – to communicate. Yet research into disorders which disrupt communication, such as post-stroke aphasia, frequently focuses on just one of those channels, speech, to the exclusion of others. In this thesis, I investigate how people with post-stroke aphasia (PWA) understand, use and integrate gestures alongside speech in dyadic interactions, and I evaluate evidence for the functions gestures serve in aphasic communication. First, I explore whether gesture production and gesture observation facilitate speech comprehension and production in (semi-)naturalistic dyadic interactions between PWA and neurologically healthy interlocuters, and I identify cognitive markers that predict gesture (dis)benefit. Next, I investigate whether gestures produced by PWA contribute to communicative success from the perspective of neurologically healthy adults. Finally, I examine whether gestures can be used within a dynamic, dyadic therapy context to facilitate lexical retrieval in a core group of PWA with significant naming impairment. I discuss these findings in relation to two influential models of speech-gesture integration: the Lexical Retrieval Hypothesis and the Information Packaging Hypothesis. I demonstrate that individual differences in working memory/executive function, gesture recognition and (visual) attention predict gesture observation and production benefit for speech comprehension and production in PWA. Further, I demonstrate that gestures serve a vital compensatory role in successful communication in PWA by encoding and transmitting semantic content when speech production is impaired. Lastly, I show that an intensive, self-paced, online therapy programme incorporating iconic gesture observation effectively improves naming accuracy in PWA, at least when gestures are closely semantically-related to target words.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Gesture in aphasia: effects on auditory comprehension, speech production and communicative effectiveness |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2025. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10215361 |
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