LITTLE ROCK — 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, Ph.D., 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.”

 

The failure to detect eye movement could be the result of attention or specific body movements. The child being assessed may have been distracted, or the eye-tracker may have a hard time reading eye movements when the child is bouncing in the seat, she said.

 

“This information is important for understanding how to arrange the testing environment to support engagement and mitigate data loss in future studies,” Muller said.

 

With more data and more accurate assessment, Muller said she hopes she can eventually create “a strengths-based measure” to pinpoint the language skills that autistic children have and build on them.

 

The lack of valid and reliable receptive language measures for autistic children who are minimally verbal or non-speaking is a significant barrier to including this subgroup in autism research and has led to a scarcity of evidence-based clinical practices for this population.

 

“This grant is evidence of the important research being done in the College of Health Professions as well as the promise of Dr. Muller’s work in this area,” said College of Health Professions Dean Susan Long, Ed.D. “We’re excited by its potential to answer some important questions in the development of therapies for autistic children.”

 

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute On Deafness And Other Communication Disorders of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R21DC022600. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.