Investigating pausing and gesturing patterns in children with and without developmental language disorder

Abstract This study aims at observing the co-occurrence of filled (FP) and unfilled pauses (UP) and gestures in the narratives of children with and without Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Although children with DLD are known to be more “disfluent” than typically developing children (TD), little is known about the role of pauses in children’s speech and their interaction with gestures. 22 French-speaking children with DLD and 22 age- and gender-matched controls, between 7 and 10, recounted a cartoon excerpt. We annotated pauses and their position in utterances, and we coded gestures according to their function. Despite a similar pausing rate across groups, results show that TD children produced more utterance-beginning FPs and more mid-utterance UPs, while children with DLD produced more standalone FPs and mid-utterance UPs. Furthermore, multimodal patterns of co-occurrence, specific to pause type, emerged. While both groups had similar gesture rates and produced mostly referential gestures, TD children produced slightly more beat gestures during FPs and more self-adaptors and pragmatic gestures during UPs. Children with DLD produced more referential gestures and object-adaptors during UPs. These differences point to the temporal relationship between gestures and pauses and the multiple ways these two phenomena may interact according to the child’s profile.