Capacity of the CCC-2 to Discriminate ASD from Other Neurodevelopmental Disorders.

Alba De La Torre Carril,Miguel Pérez-Pereira,Montserrat Durán-Bouza

doi:10.3390/children8080640

Alba De La Torre Carril, Miguel Pérez-Pereira + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/children8080640

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Abstract

The Children’s Communication Checklist (CCC-2) has demonstrated its usefulness as an instrument to assess discrepancies between the use of structural dimensions of language and the pragmatic and sociointeractive uses of language. The aims of the present paper are: (1) to test the capacity of the Galician adaptation of the CCC-2 to discriminate the linguistic profiles of children with different disorders and (2) to test whether the capacity of the CCC-2 to discriminate the linguistic abilities of children with different disorders is the same at different ages: earlier development and later development. The sample is of 117 children previously diagnosed with different disorders: autism spectrum disorder (ASD), developmental language disorder (DLD), attention deficit with hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Down syndrome children (DS) and typically developing children (TD). The children were divided into two different age groups: from 4 to 6 and from 7 to 16 years of age. The results indicate that the Galician CCC-2 (1) accurately identified children with and without communicative impairments, (2) distinguished between profiles with a predominance of pragmatic (ASD and ADHD) and structural disorders (DS and DLD) and (3) distinguished between different profiles of pragmatic impairment. The CCC-2 equally identified these profiles at both earlier and later ages. The Galician CCC-2 seems to be a useful instrument for differentiating among different clinical groups and for assessing pragmatic disorders from an early age, which can be valuable for planning early intervention.

Highlights

The main aim of the present paper is to verify the ability of the Galician version of the Children’s Communication Checklist 2nd edition (CCC-2) [1] to differentiate the linguistic profiles of children with autism spectrum disorder from those with other neurodevelopmental disorders.The CCC-2 inventory [2] was designed to explore structural and pragmatic aspects of language separately and be able to detect difficulties that differentially affect pragmatic or structural aspects
In all cases the typically developing children (TD) children obtained significantly better results than the groups of children with neurodevelopmental disorders, with the exception of SIDI. This may indicate that the main difficulties in the TD group affect sociopragmatic aspects, which coincides with the results found by different authors [12,65,69,70,71]
It enabled the differential identification of disorders in which there was a predominance of the pragmatic deficit (ASD and attention deficit with hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)) compared to those in which structural alteration predominated (DLD and Down syndrome children (DS))

Summary

Introduction

The main aim of the present paper is to verify the ability of the Galician version of the Children’s Communication Checklist 2nd edition (CCC-2) [1] to differentiate the linguistic profiles of children with autism spectrum disorder from those with other neurodevelopmental disorders. The CCC-2 inventory [2] was designed to explore structural and pragmatic aspects of language separately and be able to detect difficulties that differentially affect pragmatic or structural aspects. Content and use of language are the essential components of human communication. Form (phonology, morphology and syntax) and content (semantics) represent structural skills, while the appropriate use of language in different situations or social contexts has to do with pragmatic skills [4]. Language disorders are related to difficulties in one or more of these skills, depending on age, intellectual level and coexisting difficulties in other developmental domains [5]

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