This thesis investigated the gesture-speech relationship in pre-adolescent children who stutter in comparison to fluent controls. Significant differences were found in the speech and gesture characteristics of the narratives of the two groups on a cartoon retelling task. The children who stuttered produced less complex spoken language, fewer cartoon details. They produced fewer gestures per utterance spoken, and their gestures were less complex in form, structure and meaning. They accompanied less of their spoken narratives with gesture suggesting that gesture is produced with spoken language and does not compensate for disruptions of speech. As well, representational gestures produced in time with disfluent speech were disrupted or frozen at the precise moment of disfluency indicating that gesture and speech are closely tied in production as a single integrated system. The results of this thesis replicate those of McNeill (1986) and Scoble (1993) demonstrating the strength of the gesture-speech relationship in children and showing that stuttering affects both modalities of expression.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.21636 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Creators | Scott, Lori D. |
| Contributors | Mayberry, Rachel (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (School of Communication Sciences and Disorders.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001652932, proquestno: MQ50874, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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