More Than Words: Gestures in Typically Developing Children and in Children with Autism

This chapter aims to outline the role of gestures in children's socio-communicative development. To this scope we will not only describe how gestures offer a fertile soil for the blooming of language in children with typical development (TD), but difficulties with gestural communication in atypical populations with deficits affecting the social-communicative domains, i.e. children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs). We will start out by briefly introducing the importance of gestures in human communication, setting the ground of this field of research and providing descriptions of main gestures types. We will then proceed to provide an overview of how gestures emerging from basic motor skills precede, scaffold and mould the emergence of vocabulary in children with TD. Then we will explain why it is important to study gestures in children with ASDs and detail studies on different gesture types in children with ASDs outlining main research findings within this field. Finally, we will provide a concise overview of how gestures have been used in intervention strategies in ASDs and draw some conclusions and suggestions for future research.