Evidence for language recoding in autistic, retarded and normal children: a re-examination.

This study examined autistic children's social behavior, affect, and use of gaze during naturalistic interactions with their mothers. Sixteen autistic children, 30 to 70 months of age, and 16 normal children, matched on receptive language, participated. Children and their mothers were videotaped during three situations: a free-play period, a more structured period during which communicative demand was made on the child, and a face-to-face interaction. In all three situations, autistic and normal children did not differ in the frequency or duration of gaze at mother's face. In the one condition (face-to-face interaction) during which affective expressions were coded, autistic and normal children also were not found to differ significantly in the frequency or duration of smiles displayed, and neither group displayed frowns. However, autistic children were much less likely than normal children to combine their smiles with eye contact in a single act that conveyed communicative intent. Autistic and normal children were not found to differ in the percentages of smiles they displayed to social versus nonsocial events. However, when autistic children's responses to mother's smiles specifically were examined, it was found that they were much less likely to smile in response to mother's smiles than were normal children. Finally, it was found that mothers of autistic children displayed fewer smiles and were less likely to smile in response to their children's smiles, when compared with mothers of normal children. These findings suggest that the autistic child's unusual affective behavior may negatively affect the behavior of others.

Two memory experiments were conducted with groups of autistic, mentally retarded and normal children, matched on verbal mental age and digit span. In the first experiment free recall of semantically related and semantically unrelated word lists was investigated. Autistic children were found to be comparable to the control groups in recalling the unrelated list; however, they were significantly poorer in recalling words from the related list. The second experiment utilized a cued recall paradigm, comparing the subjects' ability to use semantic and rhyme cues to retrieve unrecalled words from memory. This time the autistic children were no different from the retarded and normal children in using semantic cues. These findings extend earlier work on cognitive deficits specific to autism, suggesting that autistic children cannot make use of linguistic knowledge to facilitate retrieval of stored information. It is speculated that this failure to use memory strategies is related to autistic children's hypothesized deficit in developing a ‘theory of mind’.

Dermatoglyphic comparisons were made among 32 autistic children aged from 4-10 to 18-11; sex-, age-, and IQ-matched retarded children; and sex- and age-matched normal children. Significant differences were found between the autistic and normal children for distribution of dermal patterns and ridge line disruption, but no significant differences were found for the total mean ridge counts or mean ridge count rankings. Apart from the right hand of the autistic children, there were no unusual scores for digital dispersion ratios. Autistic and retarded children differed only in their distribution of dermal patterns, with the autistic children apparently intermediate between retarded and normal groups. These results indicate that conclusions of unique congenital disturbance in the etiology of autism inferred from different dermatoglyphics may be premature, and that dermatoglyphics may be ineffective in delineating autistic children from other atypical populations.

This study was designed to assess the effectiveness of using prompts (extra "guiding" stimuli) for teaching normal and autistic children. One group of normal children was pretrained on a color discrimination. Later, the colors were used as prompts (presented simultaneously with new training stimuli) to teach four new discriminations. Another group of normal children was trained on the same discriminations with a trial-and-error procedure (i.e., no prompting). A third group consisted of autistic children who were trained on these discriminations using the prompt procedure. Analyses of the results showed the following. (1) The trial-and-error group of normal children acquired more discriminations than the prompt group of normal children. (2) A comparison of the two prompt groups showed that the autistics failed to transfer from the prompt cue to the training cue more often than the normal children; rather, the autistics generally continued responding to the faded color cue. (3) Autistic and normal children who failed to acquire the discriminations when trained with a prompt procedure did acquire these discriminations when no prompt was used. That is, the results suggest that the presentation of an extra guiding stimulus was detrimental to the acquisition of training discriminations for all subjects, and particularly so far autistic children. Therefore, the common practice of providing extra guiding stimuli in proportion to the severity of the learning disorder may actually be harmful to the learning of new skills. Implications of these results for future research are discussed.

In this paper, we are looking at the differences between autistic and normal children in term of fine motor movement. Previous findings have shown that there are differences between autistic children and normal children when performing a simple motor movement tasks. Imitating a finger tapping and clinching a hand are two examples of a simple motor movement tasks. Our study had adopted one of the video stimuli for clinching the hand from Brainmarkers. 6 selected autistic children and 6 selected normal children were involved in this study. The data collection is using EEG device and will be analyzed using Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and Multilayer perceptron (MLP) as classifier to discriminate between autistic and normal children. Experimental result shows the potential of verifying between autistic and normal children with accuracy of 92%. The potential of using these techniques to identify autistic children can help early detection for the purpose of early intervention. Moreover, the spectrums of the signals also present big differences between the two groups.

In order to examine the cranial CT of autistic children and investigate the etiological significance of CT scan findings, the CT of the brain was surveyed in 24 children with early infantile autism (3 to 17 years with a mean age of 7.6), and 179 children with the normal CT despite their medical histories such as headaches or febrile convulsions. According to their ages, the autistic and normal children were divided into the following three groups: Group I (age ranging from 3 to 5), Group II (age: 6 to 9) and Group III (age: 10 to 17). There was no significant difference between the bifrontal CVI of the autistic children and that of the normal children. However, in Group III, the bifrontal CVI of the autistic children was significantly higher than that of the normal children. There was no significant difference between the bicaudate CVI of the autistic children and that of the normal children. However, in Groups I and II, the bicaudate CVI of the autistic children was significantly lower than that of the normal children. The maximum widths of the third ventricle showed no significant difference between the autistic and normal children. However, in Groups II and III, those of the autistic children were wider than those of the normal children. In the autistic children, as the age increases, the difference becomes significantly wider. A positive correlation was observed between the width of the third ventricle and ages of the autistic children. An examination of the right-left ratio of maximum transverse diameter of the brain showed that there was no significant difference between the autistic and normal children. The above-mentioned results (1)-4)) might suggest a progressive disorder of the brain structure surrounding the third ventricle or lateral ventricles in the autistic children.

This study tests the hypothesis that the development of normal and autistic children differs only in rate and asymptote. A total of 195 normal children between 1 and 5 years of age, 160 normal children between 3 months and 24 months of age, and 41 autistic children between 5 and 11 years of age were evaluated on the eight psychological variables constituting the Behavioral Rating Instrument for Autistic and other Atypical Children (BRIAAC). While many similarities were found, there were a sufficient number of differences to justify DMS-III's statement that certain autistic behaviors are not normal at any stage of development. Differences were particularly prominent when the development of normal infants was compared with that of severely disturbed autistic children. In general, the issue of whether deviant development differs only quantitatively from normal development can best be decided on the basis of developmental data and by utilizing instruments that sample all the major characteristics of both populations.

The modified Behavior Observation Scale adapted from Freeman et al. was used to compare normal, retarded, and autistic children with very low developmental ages and to determine the types of behavior that could differentiate these three diagnostic categories of children. Examination of the data revealed that there was much more overlap between autistic and retarded children than between autistic and normal children. However, a behavioral pattern of autism could be delineated and very retarded autistic children could be distinguished from the nonautistic retarded children. The autistic behavioral pattern included subclusters of symptoms that might be interpreted as disturbances of sensory modulation and motility.

The syndrome of childhood autism is typified by major abnormalities in language development, yet there are few systematic descriptions of autistic children's linguistic systems. We have, therefore, begun a comprehensive investigation of the language of verbal autistic children and concentrate in this paper on comparing the syntax used by 10 verbal autistic children matched for nonlinguistic mental age with a group of mentally retarded subjects and normal controls. Two different means of assessing syntactic development were utilized: Lee's Developmental Sentence analysis and Chomsky's Transformational analysis. The autistic group was found to rank significantly lower than either the mentally retarded or the normal groups in terms of Developmental Sentence Scores. When a transformational grammar was used to describe the language samples of our subjects the autistic children were typified by a higher error rate and lower level of complexity compared to the other two groups. However, the results also indicate that the grammatical system of autistic children is rule-governed and probably not unlike that of young normal or retarded children. In conclusion, it appears that the syntactic abnormalities characteristic of autism are attributable to an extreme delay in language development as well as to an impaired ability to make use of linguistic rules.

Coding of stimulus parameters in autistic, retarded, and normal children: evidence for a two-factor theory of autism

This study involved observations of children's behaviors in interactive situations with both familiar and unfamiliar partners. The greatest differences between the autistic and nonautistic children were in an unstructured situation where caregivers did not initiate interactions. In this situation, autistic children rarely looked to the partner or initiated social bids to the partner. They also were less focused on the toys available for play compared to nonautistic children. However, the autistic children were similar in their interactive responses to the partner in an adult-initiated social situation. Individual differences confirmed that more able autistic children in terms of cognitive and language abilities also engaged in greater social and communicative behavior with the partner. These findings suggest that the ways in which social deficits are manifested by autistic children are variable with respect to the context in which they are measured.

The abilities of autistic and schizophrenic children to recognize the meanings of concrete nouns, nonemotional (neutral) adjectives, and emotional adjectives were compared to a normal control (NC) group using a picture‐matching task. Autistic children performed significantly worse than chronological‐age‐matched normal and schizophrenic children on emotional adjectives but did not differ in their abilities to recognize the meanings of nouns and neutral adjectives. Schizophrenic children did not differ from normal children in any of the three tasks. When matched on mental age, autistic and normal groups did not differ significantly. In a descriptive analysis of definitions, verbal responses from autistic children were found to be more like those of younger normal children. Considered together, these results suggest that abnormal performance on adjectives can be attributed to language delay rather than to specific autistic features. When parents, autism experts, and speech/language pathologists evaluated definitions of emotional adjectives produced by autistic and normal children, all three rater groups were able to distinguish between responses from the two groups.

Many children with autistic spectrum disorders have unusual reactions to certain sensory stimuli. These reactions vary along a hyper- to hypo-responsivity continuum. For example, some children overreact to weak sensory input, but others do not respond negatively to even strong stimuli. It is typically assumed that this deviant responsivity is linked to sensitivity, although the particular stage of sensory processing affected is not known. Psychophysical vibrotactile thresholds of six male children (age: 8–12) who were diagnosed to have autistic spectrum disorders and six normal male children (age: 7–11) were measured by using a two-alternative forced-choice task. The tactile stimuli were sinusoidal displacements and they were applied on the terminal phalanx of the left middle finger of each subject. By using a forward-masking paradigm, 40- and 250-Hz thresholds of the Pacinian tactile channel and 40-Hz threshold of the Non-Pacinian I tactile channel were determined. There was no significant difference between the thresholds of autistic and normal children, and the autistic children had the same detection and masking mechanisms as the normal children. The sensory responsivity of each subject was tested by clinical questionnaires, which showed again no difference between the two subject groups. Furthermore, no significant correlations could be found between the questionnaire data and the psychophysical thresholds. However, there was a high correlation between the data from the tactile and emotional subsets of the questionnaires. These results support the hypothesis that the hyper- and hypo-responsivity to touch, which is sometimes observed in autistic spectrum disorders, is not a perceptual sensory problem, but may probably be emotional in origin.

Objective To test the attachment quality of autism children between 2～6 years with attach-ment Q-Sort,and to understand the difference from normal children. Methods Use the AQS to test the parents of 167 normal children and 55 autism children,which can evaluate the children' attachment types. Results The rate of security attachment in normal children was 68.3% ,and the rate of unsure attachment was 31.7%. The rate of security attachment in autism children was 29.1% ,and the rate of unsure attachment was 70.9% ;and the rates of security attachment in normal and autism children were different significantly(X2=26.16, P<0.01). Attachment quality was not associated with sex both in normal and autism children and neither age was. Conclusions Most of the normal children have the security attachment,and the autism children have the unsure attachment. Neither age nor sex is associated with attachment quality both normal children and autism children. Key words: Attachment Q Sort; Children; Autism; Cross-sectional study

This study examined the language patterns of parents of 10 autistic children and parents of 10 normal children who were matched with the autistic children for language age, sex, and parents' educational level. Syntatic and functional aspects of parental language were assessed during a 20-minute interaction before the parents of the autistic children participated in a behaviorally oriented treatment program. Few significant differences emerged between the language of the parents of the autistic and normal children. The parents of the autistic children used more non-language-oriented language but did not differ from the parents of the normal children in the percentage scores for any language category. Also, although the parents of the autistic children spoke more often, complexity of language, as measured by mean length of utterance, was comparable across the groups. Several differences emerged between mothers' and fathers' language patterns. These results suggest that parents of autistic children provide language environments similar to those experienced by normal children in the initial stages of language development and that mothers and fathers play different roles in their child's language environment.