The Idea of an Essay, Volume 4

182 The Idea of an Essay: Volume 4 to the developing brain either during pregnancy or shortly after birth. CP affects people in a variety of ways, such as body movement, muscle control, muscle coordination, muscle tone, reflex, posture and balance. Although CP is a permanent condition, some effects can improve or worsen over time. CP has known correlations with visual, learning, hearing, speech, epilepsy and intellectual impairments (What is Cerebral Palsy, 2015). It is a common assumption that the inability to speak is an inability to comprehend spoken language. This idea predicts, then, that 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). Numerous studies have been done in order to find any causation or correlation between the inability to speak in children with cerebral palsy and literacy. Figure 2: Connor and I at the Special Olympics. Initial Studies 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. On the other hand, many studies show that these children may still be clearly disadvantaged in areas of processing language, both written and spoken (Dahlgren & Sandberg, 2001). Two large studies, interestingly, contrast in results