Purpose To determine whether scoring of the gestures point, give, and show were correlated across measurement tools used to assess gesture production in children with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Method Seventy-eight children with an ASD between the ages of 23 to 37 months participated. Correlational analyses were conducted to determine whether performance of three key gestures related to joint attention and behavior regulation (point, give, show) were correlated across three different measurement tools: the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule, the Early Social Communication Scale, and the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Developmental Inventory: Words and Gestures. To establish whether different measures were related at different points in development, children were subdivided into two groups based on their expressive language levels. Results The scoring of gesture performance was not entirely consistent across assessment methods. The score that a child received appeared to be influenced by theoretical perspective, gesture definition, and assessment methodology, as well as developmental level. Conclusion When assessing the gestures of children with ASD clinicians should determine what aspects of gesture they are interested in profiling, gather data from multiple sources, and consider performance in light of the measurement tool.

This study investigated the categorization abilities of 6-year-old children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) as compared to their peers with typical development (TD) using a category verification task. We examined the impact of stimulus typicality on multiple aspects of real-time performance, including accuracy, reaction time, and performance stability. Both groups were more accurate in identifying typical category members than atypical ones; however, only the ASD group's accuracy was affected by item ordering, indicating less stable performance. Furthermore, category structure was predicted by concurrent language levels in the TD group but by concurrent nonverbal IQ in the ASD group; these latter two findings suggest that children with ASD process categories differently than their peers with TD. Autism Res 2017, 10: 327-336. © 2016 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Purpose Spoken language benchmarks proposed by Tager-Flusberg et al. (2009) were used to characterize communication profiles of toddlers with autism spectrum disorders and to investigate if there were differences in variables hypothesized to influence language development at different benchmark levels. Method The communication abilities of a large sample of toddlers with autism spectrum disorders ( N = 105) were characterized in terms of spoken language benchmarks. The toddlers were grouped according to these benchmarks to investigate whether there were differences in selected variables across benchmark groups at a mean age of 2.5 years. Results The majority of children in the sample presented with uneven communication profiles with relative strengths in phonology and significant weaknesses in pragmatics. When children were grouped according to one expressive language domain, across-group differences were observed in response to joint attention and gestures but not cognition or restricted and repetitive behaviors. Conclusion The spoken language benchmarks are useful for characterizing early communication profiles and investigating features that influence expressive language growth.

The finding that the children with ASD altered their looking behaviour over the course of the experiment suggests that children with ASD were sensitive to statistical regularities present in the examiner's gaze cues and used this information to alter their looking behaviour over the course of the experiment.

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Dysarthria is a motor speech disorder caused by generalized weakness to the oral musculature that occurs as a result of damage to the central and/or peripheral nervous system (Duffy 1995; Freed 2000; Vinson 2007; Zemlin 1998). This damage may occur as a result of stroke, head injury, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, or other brain injury (American Speech-Language-Hearing Association n.d.; Freed 2000). As a consequence of oral musculature weakness, the speech of individuals with dysarthria is slow and labored, and their articulation is imprecise (Freed 2000; Zemlin 1998). Other areas of speech may also be affected including respiration, voicing, and prosody (Duffy 1995).