The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) has received a $575,113 three-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to examine the feasibility of using eye-tracking technology as a measure of the implicit word comprehension of autistic children who are minimally verbal or non-speaking.
Kristen Muller, PhD, an assistant professor in the UAMS College of Health Professions’ Speech-Language Pathology program, will use the grant to evaluate the technology, with pictures and object-stimuli, as an implicit measure of word understanding in 35 autistic children and examine eye-movement variables, which indicate their understanding of words.
Muller works primarily with non-speaking autistic children. She said many assessment methods don’t do a good job of measuring the words that they know.
“When I work with them, I see they understand language, and their parents say that they understand language. We can all see that,” Muller said. “Eye-tracking is an implicit measure of word-understanding because it doesn’t require an overt verbal or motor response. And this is a feasibility study, so we’re also looking at what is going on when the eye-tracker does not pick up on any eye movement, or when the child doesn’t respond to a question.”