The Idea of an Essay, Volume 4

170 The Idea of an Essay: Volume 4 between the inability to speak in children with cerebral palsy and literacy. It is well established that children with CP who do not speak still have intact language comprehension, so long as they have no additional cognitive impairments (Bishop & Robson, 1989; Bishop, Byers- Brown, & Robson, 1990; Duffy, 1995). Though there is high correlation between severe cerebral palsy and the presence of other disorders, the inability to speak in a person with CP is usually due solely to motor impairment, hence, having nothing to do with cognitive ability. Clearly, although it should, at this point, be well established that non-vocalism and non-literacy are different, the idea of literacy playing a role in phonological abilities predicts children with severe CP who cannot speak should have impaired speech perception, since they would have never had the chance to acquire articulatory code (Card & Dodd, 2006, p. 149). Although numerous studies have been done to evaluate this idea, results are inconsistent with each other. Two large studies, interestingly, contrast in results regarding the phonological awareness abilities of two groups of children with cerebral palsy: those who speak, and those who do not (Card & Dodd, 2006). In one of the studies, Bishop and Robson (1989) found no differences between a child with CP who could or could not speak on measures of rhyme judgement and short term memory. On the other hand, Vandervelden and Seigel (1999) found that nonspeaking children with CP have phonological processing difficulties in multiple tasks.