Autism

Screening measures to identify very young children at risk for autism spectrum disorders include the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (M–CHAT) and the Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ). To examine the validity of these written questionnaires, parents completed them prior to their child's diagnostic assessment at a tertiary autism clinic. The M–CHAT was given to 84 parents of 2 to 3-year-olds and the SCQ to 94 parents of 4 to 6-year olds. On both measures sensitivity was higher than specificity with positive predictive values 0.63–0.68. False negatives, or children with autism who were missed by screening, were somewhat higher functioning than true positives. Results were better for parents who spoke English as a second language, contrary to expectations. At this stage of development these tools would be recommended as part of more comprehensive surveillance programmes to identify children in need of further assessment but not to ‘screen out’ the possibility of autism.

The purpose of the present study was to examine the developmental outcomes of children 7 years after their initial diagnosis. Children diagnosed with autism or PDD-NOS at age 2 received follow-up evaluations at age 9. Diagnostic stability was high, with 88 percent of the sample obtaining autism spectrum diagnoses at age 9. Cognitive scores improved considerably for a large segment of the sample, with over 50 percent obtaining scores in the average range at follow-up. Language outcomes were also positive at follow-up; 88 percent of the sample demonstrated at least some functional language, and 32 percent were able to engage in conversational exchanges. Early characteristics that predicted outcome status were: age of diagnosis, age 2 cognitive and language scores, and total hours of speech-language therapy between ages 2 and 3.These findings highlight the potential long-term benefits of both early identification and early intervention, and provide additional evidence for the importance of promoting public awareness of the early signs of autism.

The study explored whether children with high functioning autism (HFA), Asperger syndrome (AS), and pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) can be differentiated on the Children's Communication Checklist (CCC). The study also investigated whether empirically derived autistic subgroups can be identified with a cluster analytic method based on the Autism Diagnostic Interview–Revised. Fifty-seven children with HFA, 47 with AS, 31 with PDD-NOS, and a normal control group of 47 children between 6 and 13 years participated. Children with HFA,AS, and PDDNOS showed pragmatic communication deficits in comparison to the controls. Little difference was found between the three subtypes with respect to their CCC profile.A three-cluster solution explained the data best.The HFA cluster showed most autism characteristics, followed by the combined HFA + AS cluster, and then the PDD-NOS cluster. The findings support the autism spectrum concept based on severity of symptom impairment rather than distinct categories.

This study used an intact group comparison to examine attention following in 34 children aged 2 years diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) matched pairwise for vocabulary comprehension with a group of typically developing toddlers. For both groups of children, the presence of verbal labels during a referential task increased attention to a novel object over and above the attention-facilitating effect of child-directed talking without labeling.The typically developing children displayed more attention following than comprehension matched children with ASD across experimental conditions and there was no significant difference between the groups in the facilitative effect of hearing verbal labels. Implications for word-learning theory, intervention strategies and future research are considered.