Background: In recent years, there has been increased identification of disfluencies in individuals with autism, but limited examination of disfluencies in the school-age range of this population. We currently lack information about whether the disfluencies of children with autism represent concomitant stuttering, normal disfluency, excessive normal disfluency, or some form of disfluency unique to the school-age population of children with autism. Aims: This paper explores the nature of disfluencies in school-aged children with autism in comparison with matched children who stutter and controls. It explores stuttering-like disfluencies, non-stuttering-like disfluencies and word-final disfluencies. Methods & Procedures:This study compared disfluency patterns in 11 school-aged children with Asperger's syndrome (AS), 11 matched children who stutter (CWS), and 11 matched children with no diagnosis (ND). Analyses were based on speech samples collected during an expository discourse task. Outcomes & Results:Results reveal statistically significant differences between children with AS and CWS and between children with AS and those with ND for the percentage of words containing stuttering-like disfluencies. In the AS group, four out of 11 (36%) met the common diagnostic criteria for a fluency disorder. Disfluencies in the AS group differed qualitatively and quantitatively from the CWS, and included a larger distribution of word-final disfluencies. Conclusions & Implications:This study provides initial data regarding patterns of disfluency in school-aged children with AS that, with careful consideration and the cautious application of all findings, can assist therapists in making more evidence-based diagnostic decisions. Findings offer evidence that when working with children with AS, disfluencies both similar and dissimilar to those of CWS may be identified in at least a subset of those with AS. Therefore, children with AS should be screened for fluency disorders during their initial evaluation and treated if it is determined that the fluency disorder negatively impacts the effectiveness of communication.

Few researchers have examined the narrative abilities of underachieving gifted students. This study investigated the ability of eighth-grade underachieving gifted adolescents to spontaneously produce oral narratives by comparing their stories to those that were produced by achieving gifted peers. It was hypothesized that evidence of difficulty generating the stories relative to the macrostructure (organization of ideas across sentences) and the microstructure (organization of ideas within sentences) would be exhibited by the underachieving gifted subjects. Twenty 13-year-old eighth-graders served as subjects in the present investigation. All were identified as gifted by their local school system and were enrolled in the gifted program at the time of their participation in the study. Ten of the subjects met criteria for the underachieving gifted group and ten met criteria for the achieving gifted group. The stories produced by the underachieving gifted subjects were compared to those produced by their achieving gifted peers for differences in 13 dependent measures of story length, episodic integrity, story grammar components, and sentence complexity. Differences in the mean number of occurrences of each of the 13 variables were found. The result of the MANOVA revealed that when the 13 dependent variables were considered in combination, the stories told by the underachieving gifted subjects differed significantly from those produced by the achieving gifted subjects at the p < .05 level of significance. Results of the univariate analyses indicated that these differences were not accounted for by any one element of story macrostructure or microstructure, but rather that the stories differed across multiple dimensions, each of which contributed to the overall difference. The results of this study suggest that the language of underachieving gifted children may differ from that of gifted peers when narrative language is examined. Results are discussed relative to the limitations of the study and implications for future research.