Published on Show Me Mizzou April 24, 2025
When listening to someone speak, it can be difficult to understand every subtle meaning or suss out the most important parts. These challenges grow more acute for children with autism working on their language skills or people learning a second language, says Laura Morett, assistant professor in the Department of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences. She and postdoctoral associate Bashar Farran tackle such barriers with their research on how gestures accompanying speech can help listeners understand.
Unlike sign language, which is a fully fledged tongue of its own, gestures are an added layer of communication that performs various functions. Categories of gestures include iconic (pretending to peel a banana), deictic (pointing where an owl flew past), beat (motioning to emphasize a key word) and metaphorical (closing a hand to illustrate grasping an idea).
Morett and Farran currently are using infrared light to look directly into the brains of children with autism, who are less likely to gesture as early, often or effectively as typically developing children. Discovering how their brains react to gestures either matched or mismatched to speech is an early step toward testing the success of current therapies and developing better ones.
In other research, Morett wanted to find out whether metaphorical gestures could help learners of a second language that employs pitch to convey meaning. Take the Mandarin word ma, which means mother, flax or horse depending on whether the pitch is high, rising or dipping. In a study of how well English speakers could distinguish such words, Morett saw learning increase when teachers’ hand gestures rose and fell with the pitches.
Stay tuned: Morett recently earned a Fulbright scholarship to examine how gestures are used to convey pitch in Turkey.
