Researchers have suggested that individuals with autism have difficulties with self-regulation in early infancy, which may represent an early risk factor for autism. In this study, the authors explored self-regulatory behavior in young children who were later diagnosed with autism. Parents of children diagnosed with autism (n = 65) retrospectively reported on their children's self-regulatory difficulties at 1 year of age using the Temperament and Atypical Behavior Scale (TABS). One-year-olds with typical development (n = 120) from the TABS norming efforts served as the comparison group. Results indicate children diagnosed with autism exhibited significantly more self-regulatory difficulties at 1 year of age than did the comparison group. In addition, 86% of the parents reported that their children exhibited self-regulatory difficulties consistent with a diagnosis of regulatory disorder at 1 year of age.

This study examined the phonological and reading performance in English of Malaysian children whose home language was Bahasa Malaysia (BM). A sample of 69 Malaysian Standard Two pupils (aged 7-8 years) was selected for the study. Since commencing school at the age of 6 years, the children had been learning to read in BM and had subsequently also been learning to read in English for some 12 months. The study was part of a larger scale research programme that fully recognized the limitations of tests that had not been developed and standardized in Malaysia. Nevertheless, as a first step to developing such tests, a comparison with existing norms for the Phonological Assessment Battery (PhAB) and the Wechsler Objective Reading Dimension (WORD) was undertaken in relation to information about the children's L1 and L2 language competencies. Results showed that the children's performance on PhAB was at least comparable to the UK norms while, not surprisingly, they fared less well on WORD. The results are discussed in terms of L1 and L2 transfer, whereby the transparency of written BM and the structured way in which reading is taught in BM facilitates performance on phonological tasks in English. This has implications for identifying children with phonologically based reading difficulties.

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