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At our facility which serves persons with cerebral palsy, Lesch-Nyhan disease, and other neurodevelopmental disorders, we have been training medical students and other healthcare professionals-in-training to interact effectively with their patients who are nonverbal due to developmental disorders. In that process, we constantly observe the medical students adopting a high pitched tone of voice and child-like manner of speech even when the students are informed that their patients are normal or near normal in cognitive ability. I'm interested in doing a series of studies, involving both voice analysis and measurement of implicit attitudes using the Implicit Association Test, to look at the degree to which healthcare professionals associate disability with child-like characteristics and the degree to which this association might be evidenced in their interactions with patients or prospective patients who have disabilities. I'm sure there must be a literature out there on infantilization of persons with disabilities in social interactions, but I haven't been able to locate it using PsychInfo, Medline, or other databases (at least not with the keywords I've been using). Can anyone suggest a lead or two? Thanks much, Ken Robey Matheny Institute for Research in Developmental Disabilities [log in to unmask]