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

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.