Gestos de crianças com transtorno do espectro autista em aquisição da linguagem: o que dizem os estudos de 2017 a 2021 na área de Letras-Linguística do CNPQ?

Abstract

The study of gestures in autism may reveal the representation of language, especially in children with ASD, who are non-verbal. Social interaction and communication are the great challenges for children with ASD, but through gestures they can express feelings, thoughts and needs. The general objective of this research is to investigate studies on gestures in children with ASD in language acquisition, considering the area of knowledge Letters/Linguistics of CNPq. Thus, we carried out a study of a bibliographic nature through a survey of national scientific articles, in the databases: Scielo, Portal de Periódicos da Capes, Google Scholar using the descriptors: (i) gestures; (ii) autism; (iii) language acquisition. For the survey of the studies, we considered as a cut the national research published from the year 2017 to 2021. In this dissertation, we defend that gestures are considered from a multimodal perspective, which conceives their linguistic status, as defended by Kendon(1972, 1980). , 2017), McNeill (1985, 1992, 2000, 2002); that is, they co-operate, together with vocal production, in language acquisition, as suggested by studies by Fonte et al (2014), Fonte and Cavalcante (2016), Cavalcante (2018), among others. The partial results of this research show different theoretical perspectives in studies on gestures in autism, with a predominance of the multimodal perspective. The researched gestures were: deictic gestures, emblematic gestures, pointing gestures, motor stereotypes, facial expression-gaze and body movements, with the pointing gesture being the most studied in national research from 2017 to 2021. It is expected that the results of this study contribute to the area of language acquisition and studies on language in children with autism, enabling the understanding of their gestures in a multimodal perspective.