Overcoming lexical difficulties in patients with motor aphasia: The role of gestures.

The present work is dedicated to the role of gestures in overcoming lexical access problems in patients with motor aphasia. The study is based on a corpus of narratives by brain-damaged individuals — “Russian CliPS” («Clinical Pear Stories»), where all videos are annotated in the linguistic annotation tool “ELAN”, with gestural layout included in the analysis. The results suggest that difficulties with lexical access are often related to the search for nouns and verbs, while gestures (deictic and rhythmic gestures, beats) facilitate lexical access in patients.