Abstrakt
In my investigation, I work with 6 persons with diagnosed aphasia. I introduce some possible perspectives on the exploration of the extent of speech damage in persons with aphasia and the various ways they substitute language deficiency with the aid of gestures.
From the viewpoint of data processing methods, I explore, on the one hand, the parameters of spoken language such as the quantity of words, and, on the other hand, the parameters of gestures such as the quantity of gestures, diversity of gestures, etc. With aphasic persons speaking Czech, I verify the following assumption established by Jakob et al. (2011): the more speech-limited an aphasic person is, the more gestures he/she produces during the interpretation of a story.
I compare my results with Jakob's et al. results and with results of Wiesmayer et al., who claim the opposite. It was found that number of words produced in aphasic persons vary and partially depend on specific type of aphasia, particularly on both ends of a scale - people with large speech distortion use highest quantity of gestures, people with low speech distortion use gestures to a lesser extent.
Within the classification of semantic gestures, I focus particularly on iconic and deictic gestures. I presume alongside that symbolic gestures (i.e. emblems) do not occur in aphasic persons' speech, because aphasic persons prefer gestures that display the plot in the most concrete way.
My data correlate with another studies dealing with this topic - aphasic persons do use gestures intentionally to substitute their verbal deficiency. At the same time, they use mostly very concrete (iconic) gestures, which enable them to transmit large amount of information.