International Meeting for Autism Research: Assessing Cognition and Language In Nonverbal Children with Autism: Is the Frog Green?

Assessing Cognition and Language In Nonverbal Children with Autism: Is the Frog Green?

Thursday, May 12, 2011: 11:00 AM
Elizabeth Ballroom A-C (Manchester Grand Hyatt)
10:30 AM
A. A. Benasich1, V. L. Shafer2, J. Flax3,4, Y. H. Yu5 and M. MacRoy-Higgins6, (1)Center for Molecular & Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers University Newark, Newark, NJ, (2)Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, College of the City of New York, New York, NY, (3)Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, United States, (4)Department of Genetics, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, (5)Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, The City University of New York, New York, NY, (6)Communication Sciences Program, Hunter College-CUNY, New York, NY
The majority of nonverbal/minimally verbal subjects have little to no access to effective communication, thus their cognitive capacity remains essentially unknown. Given that lack of expressive language does not necessarily indicate lack of receptive language abilities, we developed a battery of adapted information processing tasks and linguistic EEG/ERP assessments that do not require expressive language and thus may allow more accurate descriptions of the capabilities of these children. An overview will be given of these tasks as well as preliminary results highlighting outcomes as compared to an age-matched typically developing control group. It is hoped that these passive electrophysiological and behavioral tasks will allow researchers to identify and begin to quantify the linguistic and cognitive abilities of this difficult to assess group of children with ASD.
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