The Communication Matrix is a free online assessment tool designed to evaluate how people with severe disabilities communicate, even when they don’t use speech or language. It maps out every way a person expresses themselves, from body movements and facial expressions to gestures, pictures, and words, and organizes those behaviors into a visual profile that parents, teachers, and therapists can use to set goals and track progress over time.
Who the Communication Matrix Is For
The tool was built specifically for individuals with significant communication challenges, particularly children and adults who communicate without traditional language. It covers the earliest stages of communication development, starting with reflexive, unintentional behaviors like crying or body tension, all the way through symbolic communication with words, signs, or devices.
The largest groups represented in the Communication Matrix database reflect its focus on complex disabilities: 25% have a primary diagnosis of autism, 18% have cerebral palsy, 16% have developmental disability or delay, 10% have deafblindness, and 8% have Down syndrome. It’s also widely used for rarer conditions like Angelman syndrome, CHARGE syndrome, Rett syndrome, and Cornelia de Lange syndrome. In professional ratings, the Matrix scored 4.9 out of 5 for assessing communication skills, 4.8 out of 5 for evaluating children with severe cognitive impairment, and 4.8 out of 5 for assessing children without language. Those ratings make it one of the most highly regarded tools in its category.
How the Matrix Is Organized
The Communication Matrix works as a grid. One axis tracks the level of communication development, and the other tracks the reasons a person communicates. This structure lets you see not just what someone can do, but why they’re doing it.
Seven Levels of Communication
The vertical axis breaks communication into seven developmental levels. Level I captures pre-intentional behavior, the kind of responses that happen automatically, like startling at a loud noise or fussing when uncomfortable. The person isn’t trying to send a message, but a caregiver can still read meaning from the behavior. Levels II and III cover intentional but pre-symbolic communication: the person is now deliberately trying to communicate, first through unconventional behaviors (like pulling someone’s hand toward a desired object) and then through conventional gestures (like pointing or nodding). Levels IV through VII represent increasingly sophisticated symbolic communication, progressing from concrete symbols like pictures or objects to abstract language using words, signs, or communication devices.
Four Reasons to Communicate
The horizontal axis sorts every communicative behavior into four broad purposes:
- Refuse: rejecting things that are unwanted, like pushing away food or shaking one’s head
- Obtain: requesting things that are wanted, like reaching toward a toy or selecting a picture on a device
- Social: engaging in social interaction, like greeting someone or seeking attention
- Information: sharing or seeking information, like commenting on something or asking a question
Under each of these four categories are more specific messages. The questions you answer while completing the assessment correspond to these individual messages, so the finished profile shows exactly which communicative functions a person has mastered, which are emerging, and which haven’t appeared yet.
What the Results Look Like
Completing the assessment produces two main outputs. The first is a one-page profile: a color-coded grid that gives you an immediate visual snapshot of where a person’s communication skills fall across all seven levels and four functions. You can see at a glance, for example, that a child refuses things using conventional gestures (Level III) but only obtains things using unconventional behaviors (Level II). That kind of uneven profile is common and extremely useful for planning, because it tells you exactly where to focus.
The second output is a detailed Communication Skills List that breaks down every specific behavior the person uses, organized by level and function. This list becomes a practical reference for writing goals in an educational plan or choosing which skills to target in therapy. Because the tool tracks the same skills over time, it’s also sensitive enough to document small but meaningful gains that other assessments might miss. This is especially important for children with severe and multiple disabilities, where progress can be slow and traditional language milestones don’t apply.
How to Complete the Assessment
The Communication Matrix is available for free at communicationmatrix.org. It can be completed online or on paper, and the results appear in the same format either way. The online version is available in eight languages: English, Spanish, Czech, Dutch, Traditional Chinese, Russian, Korean, and Vietnamese.
Anyone who knows the person well can complete the assessment. That includes parents, teachers, speech-language pathologists, or other caregivers. You answer a series of questions about specific behaviors you’ve observed, indicating whether each behavior is not used, emerging, or mastered. No special training or certification is required, though professionals often complete it alongside family members to get the most accurate picture. The tool was designed to be accessible to families, not just clinicians, so the language is straightforward and the questions describe observable, everyday behaviors rather than abstract clinical concepts.
Why It Matters for Planning and Progress
Standard communication assessments tend to focus on speech and language milestones, which means they often bottom out for individuals with severe disabilities. A child who communicates entirely through body movements and facial expressions may score at the lowest possible level on a typical speech assessment, with no useful detail about what they can actually do. The Communication Matrix fills that gap by treating pre-linguistic and non-symbolic communication as meaningful, mappable skills rather than a blank space below “first words.”
The visual profile also makes it easy to share information across a team. A therapist, teacher, and parent can all look at the same one-page grid and immediately understand where a child is, what’s emerging, and what logical next steps look like. Because the tool scored 4.6 out of 5 for reflecting educational progress, it’s frequently used to document growth in individualized education programs where traditional benchmarks don’t capture the full picture.