| Sumario: | Background & Aims: People with latent aphasia, who have had a dominant hemisphere brain injury yet score above standardized test cut-offs for aphasia, demonstrate significant communication differences during discourse compared to cognitively healthy adults. To further characterize communication differences, this study is the first to compare spontaneous co-speech gesture production during spoken discourse in people with latent aphasia and cognitively healthy adults. Methods & Procedures: We leveraged AphasiaBank database videos to code iconic gestures during the Cinderella story retell and the Sandwich procedural narrative from 32 people with latent aphasia and 32 cognitively healthy adults. Gestures were coded for their relationship ("function") to speech: redundant, supplementary, or essential to understanding the spoken message. We investigated differences in gesture frequency and function both between groups and discourse types. We further characterized how these patterns related to neuropsychological information and language measures. Outcomes & Results: Individuals with latent aphasia produced more iconic gestures than cognitively healthy adults, but only in the Sandwich task. While cognitively healthy adults produced gestures of the same function (typically, redundant with speech) and frequency across tasks, individuals with latent aphasia produced more gestures in Sandwich than Cinderella discourse tasks. This task difference was correlated with aphasia severity. Within the latent aphasia group, redundant gestures were more frequent in Cinderella than in the Sandwich task. Redundant gestures correlated with number of words produced, wh ile supplementary and essential gestures were associated with speaking duration in the Sandwich task, but no gesture-language associations were found in the Cinderella task for individuals with latent aphasia. Conclusions: For the first time, we characterized co-speech gesture use in persons with latent aphasia. Our findings highlight that persons with latent aphasia, despite having subtle impairments of language, rely on iconic gesture to convey critical information more often than their peers. This is a pattern also shown in persons with clinical aphasia. Group differences in discourse production and gesture use underscore the need for multimodal communication support for individuals with latent aphasia. Gesture, often used in aphasia therapy to aid word retrieval and convey additional information, must be further investigated to understand daily communication barriers and inform targeted therapies for latent aphasia.
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