Orientation to pictorial novelty by speech-disordered children.

The Mackworth wide-angle reflection eye camera was used to record the position of the gaze on a display of 16 white symbols. One of these symbols changed to red after 30 sec, remained red for a minute of testing, and then became white again. Ten aphasic children (aged 5-9) were compared with 10 normal children matched for sex and age. The normal children looked immediately at the red circle, and then began to look away. The 3 aphasics with low verbal LQ., but high nonverbal I.Q., stared at the red circle for the whole minute. These 3 children with high nonverbal LQ.s were markedly different from the children with low non-verbal I.Q.s. The 7 less severe cases showed poor visual orientation, being slow to look at the novel item, and often looking away from the display. Prolonged staring at novelty appears to be related to more serious problems specifically involving speech and suggests a difficulty in forming an internal model, while generalized failure of visual orientation to external novelty appears to be related to low I.Q. as a whole.