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Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders

Gepubliceerd in:

01-01-2014 | Original Paper

Longitudinal Analyses of Expressive Language Development Reveal Two Distinct Language Profiles Among Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Auteurs: Saime Tek, Laura Mesite, Deborah Fein, Letitia Naigles

Gepubliceerd in: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders | Uitgave 1/2014

Abstract

Although children with Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show significant variation in language skills, research on what type(s) of language profiles they demonstrate has been limited. Using growth-curve analyses, we investigated how different groups of young children with ASD show increases in the size of their lexicon, morpho-syntactic production as measured by Brown’s 14 grammatical morphemes, and wh-question complexity, compared to TD children, across six time points. Children with ASD who had higher verbal skills were comparable to TD children on most language measures, whereas the children with ASD who had low verbal skills had flatter trajectories in most language measures. Thus, two distinct language profiles emerged for children with ASD.

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Although the term ASD includes a group of disorders that are classified as pervasive developmental disorders in the DSM-IV-TR (APA 2000), this study reports findings from children with a diagnosis of autistic disorder or pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) according to DSM-IV criteria. Therefore, unless specified otherwise, the term ASD in this paper mostly refers to children with a diagnosis of autism and PDD-NOS.

We did not use t scores of the MSEL Expressive Language Scale to match the groups, as they were not matched in chronological age (Mervis and Klein-Tasman 2004). We recruited young children with ASD to investigate early language acquisition in this population, as soon as possible after a diagnosis was obtained. However, because the average age of ASD diagnosis is around four in United States (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2012), the mean age for this group of early-diagnosed children was 32.85 months at visit 1. We recruited TD controls whose expressive language was on par with children with ASD, but they were younger than the ASD group. We also did not use age-equivalency scores of the MSEL, because the age-equivalency scores are on ordinal scale, which can make the analysis using these scores less interpretable or meaningful compared to raw scores, which are on interval scale (Mervis and Klein-Tasman 2004).

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Titel: Longitudinal Analyses of Expressive Language Development Reveal Two Distinct Language Profiles Among Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders
Auteurs: Saime Tek
Laura Mesite
Deborah Fein
Letitia Naigles
Publicatiedatum: 01-01-2014
Uitgeverij: Springer US
Gepubliceerd in: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders / Uitgave 1/2014
Print ISSN: 0162-3257
Elektronisch ISSN: 1573-3432
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-013-1853-4

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