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Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders

Gepubliceerd in:

01-08-2006 | ORIGINAL PAPER

Residual Language Deficits in Optimal Outcome Children with a History of Autism

Auteurs: Elizabeth Kelley, Jennifer J. Paul, Deborah Fein, Letitia R. Naigles

Gepubliceerd in: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders | Uitgave 6/2006

Abstract

This study examined whether language deficits persist even in children with optimal outcomes. We examined a group of children with prior diagnoses on the autism spectrum who had IQs in the normal range, were in age-appropriate mainstream classes, and had improved to such an extent that they were considered to be functioning at the level of their typically developing peers. Fourteen such children between the ages of five and nine were matched on age and sex with typically developing children, and were given a battery of 10 language tests to investigate their language abilities. Results indicated that while these children’s grammatical capabilities are mostly indistinguishable from their peers, they are still experiencing difficulties in pragmatic and semantic language.

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Prosody, and phonology in general, are also areas of difficulty for children with autism (Shriberg, Paul, McSweeney, Klin, & Cohen, 2001; Wolk & Giesen, 2000). Because our study did not address these areas, though, space constraints do not permit us to review them.

This occurred with only one of the ASD group. In addition, there were technical difficulties with the videotape for one of the TD children; thus his enactments are not included.

For the intransitive verbs in transitive frames, Frame Compliant enactments were those where the child treated the first animal spoken as a causal agent of the second animal’s motion (e.g., “*the zebra comes the horse”, enacted as the child using the zebra to push, force, or carry the horse). Verb Compliant enactments were those where the children had the horse and zebra move separately. For the transitive verbs in intransitive frames, Frame Compliant enactments were those where the children had the animal performing some sort of non-causative action (e.g., “*The elephant brings,” enacted as simply moving the elephant around in some manner without using another object). If children added a direct object, and had the elephant move another animal from one location to another, the enactment was then coded as Verb Compliant. Enactments were coded as Other when they did not fit into one of the two preceding categories.

Recall that, while the ASD group’s scores on the Categorical Induction task were consistently lower than those of the TD, this difference only reached significance for those items that depicted animate natural kinds (see Table 4). Greater capability with inanimate than animate stimuli has been reported before in connection with ASD: Animate objects may be over-arousing; hence, less attention is paid to them (Frith & Happe, 1998) or they are less inherently reinforcing to children (Hauck, Fein, Maltby, Waterhouse, & Feinstein, 1998).

When the correlations were conducted using the raw scores of the standardized tests, the TD group’s scores yielded three additional significant correlations between narrative variables and the lexical/grammatical measures; the ASD yielded none.

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Titel: Residual Language Deficits in Optimal Outcome Children with a History of Autism
Auteurs: Elizabeth Kelley
Jennifer J. Paul
Deborah Fein
Letitia R. Naigles
Publicatiedatum: 01-08-2006
Uitgeverij: Springer US
Gepubliceerd in: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders / Uitgave 6/2006
Print ISSN: 0162-3257
Elektronisch ISSN: 1573-3432
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-006-0111-4

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