Promoting the integration of language, cognition and gesture for individuals with neurological disorders rehabilitation: A point of view and directions for future research.

The cost of neurological disorders for our societies is increasing and calls for innovative and effective treatments. A large body of neuroscientific findings indicates that action and cognition are largely intermingled in the brain. Consistent research comes from studies on the link between gestures and language, for instance, showing that co-speech gestures play a role in lexical retrieval. Consequently, a perspective which integrates gestures and language in rehabilitation appears promising for the treatment of many language-related disorders occurring following neurodegenerative disease or cerebrovascular disease. Here we discuss how interventions for language disorders which integrate gestures appear to be promising, despite the fact that such interventions are still limited, and their efficacy has not been systematically tested yet. Specifically, we discuss findings illustrating how gesture-based treatments can be effective for the recovery of language disorders, and how language-based treatments can favor the positive outcome of motor rehabilitation. Beyond language, we highlight the importance of considering gestures in other important aspects of human cognition. This is the case of numerical cognition, where gestures play an important role in learning and expressing magnitude information (e.g., finger counting). We finally discuss the importance of promoting innovative rehabilitation protocols together with a comprehensive knowledge of individual differences in the brain mechanisms at play during recovery. Effective rehabilitation and recovery should be a major challenge for researchers and clinicians: integrating gestures might finally result in more ecological rehabilitation interventions and better translation of benefits to daily life activities.