Attentional Distribution and Word Learning in Children with Autism
Preschoolers with severe autism and minimal speech were assigned either a discrete trial or a naturalistic language treatment, and parents of all participants also received parent responsiveness training. After 12 weeks, both groups showed comparable improvement in number of spoken words produced, on average. Approximately half the children in each group achieved benchmarks for the first stage of functional spoken language development, as defined by Tager-Flusberg et al. (J Speech Lang Hear Res, 52: 643-652, 2009). Analyses of moderators of treatment suggest that joint attention moderates response to both treatments, and children with better receptive language pre-treatment do better with the naturalistic method, while those with lower receptive language show better response to the discrete trial treatment. The implications of these findings are discussed.
Recent findings suggest impaired motor skill development during infancy in children later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, it remains unclear whether infants at high familial risk for ASD would benefit from early interventions targeting the motor domain. The current study investigated this issue by providing 3-month-old infants at high familial risk for ASD with training experiences aimed at facilitating independent reaching. A group of 17 high-risk (HR) infants received 2 weeks of scaffolded reaching experiences using “sticky mittens,” and was compared to 72 low-risk (LR) infants experiencing the same or alternative training procedures. Results indicate that HR infants – just like LR infants – show an increase in grasping activity following “sticky mittens” training. In contrast to LR infants, evidence that motor training encouraged a preference for faces in HR infants was inconclusive.
Keywords: autism spectrum disorders; grasping; infancy; motor development; sticky mittens.
Children’s early motor skills are critical for development across language, social, and cognitive domains, and warrant close examination. However, examiner-administered motor assessments are time consuming and expensive. Parent-report questionnaires offer an efficient alternative, but validity of parent report is unclear and only few motor questionnaires exist. In this report, we use cross-sectional and longitudinal data to investigate the validity of parent report in comparison to two examiner-administered measures (Mullen Scales of Early Learning, MSEL; Peabody Developmental Motor Scales, PDMS-2), and introduce a new parent-report measure called the Early Motor Questionnaire (EMQ). Results indicate strong correlations between parent report on the EMQ and a child’s age, robust concurrent and predictive validity of parent report with both the MSEL and PDMS-2, and good test-retest reliability of parent report on the EMQ. Together, our findings support the conclusion that parents provide dependable accounts of early motor and cognitive development.
Keywords: Autism; Motor development; Parent report; Questionnaire.
The Early Autism Risk Longitudinal Investigation (EARLI), an ongoing study of a risk-enriched pregnancy cohort, examines genetic and environmental risk factors for autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). We simulated the potential effects of both measurement error (ME) in exposures and misclassification of ASD-related phenotype (assessed as Autism Observation Scale for Infants (AOSI) scores) on measures of association generated under this study design. We investigated the impact on the power to detect true associations with exposure and the false positive rate (FPR) for a non-causal correlate of exposure (X2, r=0.7) for continuous AOSI score (linear model) versus dichotomised AOSI (logistic regression) when the sample size (n), degree of ME in exposure, and strength of the expected (true) OR (eOR)) between exposure and AOSI varied. Exposure was a continuous variable in all linear models and dichotomised at one SD above the mean in logistic models. Simulations reveal complex patterns and suggest that: (1) There was attenuation of associations that increased with eOR and ME; (2) The FPR was considerable under many scenarios; and (3) The FPR has a complex dependence on the eOR, ME and model choice, but was greater for logistic models. The findings will stimulate work examining cost-effective strategies to reduce the impact of ME in realistic sample sizes and affirm the importance for EARLI of investment in biological samples that help precisely quantify a wide range of environmental exposures.
Keywords: Epidemiological Methods; MCH; Research Design in Epidemiology.