Revealing hidden competencies: a new method for studying language comprehension in children with motor impairments

Pilot work on a new method to assess language comprehension in children with motor impairments was presented. The paradigm is based on the premise that children will prefer to watch a video event that matches a linguistic stimulus rather than an event that does not match the linguistic stimulus. Two experiments, one on noun comprehension and one on verb comprehension, were conducted on young children having cerebral palsy and other neurological pathology associated with motor deficits. The potential advantages of this method over existing methods to assess language comprehension in handicapped as well as nonhandicapped populations were described.