Non-verbal communication of the autistic child

The understanding of non-verbal cues used by other people, such as gestures and facial expression, is severely affected. There is poor comprehension of the information conveyed by gesture, miming, facial expression, bodily posture, vocal intonation, etc. The strangeness and poverty of gestures in autistic children is noticeable, with absence of expressive gestures of the kind that usually accompany speech. Even very simple gestures, such as pointing, may be lacking. "Elly did not point. Nor did she try to get objects which were not within her reach; Elly is eight years old now. I have still never seen her point". (Park, 1972:12)
The following account is drawn almost wholly from Rita Jordan (1985). The use of signing with autistic children has been growing consistently since the early 70's. In 1983 half of the fourteen schools in Britain for autistic children were using some form of sign system. The hope is that the 'easier' sign language will provide a structure from which English can develop as a second language. The reasons why signing is 'easier' are probably multiple. The neurophysiological findings suggest that there may be differential disturbance of left-hemisphere brain functions in autistic children and there is some evidence that signing may be processed in the right hemisphere of the brain. Sign language is also more iconic than speech; autistic children learn iconic signs faster and retain them more readily than non-iconic ones. Signs are promptable - they can be physically guided. It is easier to make individual signs distinct than to separate individual words from the stream of speech. In the light of the 'failure' of speech programmes, signing may be presented as a new activity - free from association with that experience of failure. All the studies report an increase in social awareness and a decrease in tantrums following the development of a system of communication. It is hoped that the child will learn to code his or her experiences and thus build up cognitive structures which are the basis for much later learning.
The most interesting aspect of the use of signing has been that often along with increasing ability to use signs has gone improvement in vocalisation and the ability to use words. So in the case of Gary, a three year old boy, who made a few sounds but who could copy simple gestures fairly readily, imitation of gestures was systematically encouraged until he could use such signs spontaneously to indicate his wishes. At the same time he began to vocalise more when using these signs although the vocalisations were generally rather indistinct.
Work by Creedon with 30 autistic children in America(see Jordan, 1985: 1) was very influential in that it offered hope that through signing a proportion of them at least would acquire speech. Along with overall progress in signing, some children developed spontaneous speech which gradually was produced more and more clearly. There has been the repeated observation that spontaneous vocalisations are often produced in conjunction with signs. While learning to sign many children produce closer and closer approaches to the spoken word. According to Luria (quoted by Fay and Schuler, 1980: 160),body movements, particularly hand movements, facilitate speech production otherwise hampered by various types of brain damage . Such a facilitation effect may be related to the neural overlap that supposedly exists between oral and manual activities (Kimura and Archibald 1974). Activities of one neural region might trigger related action in adjoining areas. But such a triggering effect has not been limited to signs. The spontaneous emergence of vocalisations that accompany hand movements was also noted by Carrier(1976) and Bonvillian and Nelson(1976). One might speculate that motor action might allow the formation of a representational framework for other action and thus reinforce the acquisition of meaning.(Tustin) The boy's progress [being taught signs] suggests that autism is a disorder of cross-modal perception rather than of symbolic functioning. (Fulwiler and Fouts 1976)