Gestures in Drawing Instructions by High Functioning Autistic Children

Autism spectrum disorder is one of pervasive developmental disorders, characterized by persistent challenges in many social communication and social interaction domains, including gestural communication. An area of special importance for autistic individuals is the ability to gesture when knowledge status is asymmetrical between interlocutors. Successful communication in such a case requires autistic individuals to take the interlocutor’s perspective and adapt their gestures accordingly. Previous research has well documented autistic children’s perspective taking challenges manifested in verbal communication while very few studies investigated their gestural communication. So the present study will investigate whether high functioning autistic children are comparable to typically developing children in designing their gesture by taking the interlocutor’s perspective. A drawing instruction task was used. In this task, children described pictures presented on iPad or laptop to the interlocutor. The interlocutor could not see the screen but was required to replicate the pictures on paper based on children’s instruction. Both parties had no constraints on communicative behaviors. It thus provides a natural sample to investigate children’s gesture behaviors.