Combinatorial Language parent-report Scores Differ Significantly Between Typically Developing Children and Those with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Four distinct stages of human language evolution are suggested by clustering of speech and language comprehension abilities in individuals with language deficits

“…Caregivers provided informed consented to participate in the study and completed a 133-item questionnaire approximately every three months. Inclusion criteria for this study were as follows: absence of seizures (which commonly result in intermittent, unstable language deficits 24 ), absence of serious and moderate sleep problems (which are also associated with intermittent, unstable language deficits 25 ), age range of 4 to 21 years (the lower age cutoff was chosen to ensure that participants were exposed to complete set of items listed in Table 1 26 ; the upper age cutoff was chosen to avoid analysis of participants who may be linguistically declining due to aging). When caregivers have completed several evaluations, the last evaluation was used for analysis.…”

Human language evolution: clustering of fifteen language comprehension abilities in 55558 individuals suggests three-step-wise language comprehension acquisition

“…E.g., if participants were never exposed to numbers, they would not understand the concept of numbers; if they were never exposed to spatial prepositions, they would not understand spatial prepositions. However, by four years of age (the lower cutoff in our study) participants were exposed to all variety of items listed in Table 1 13 . Furthermore, limiting cluster analysis to older participants 6 to 21 years of age also demonstrated the same clustering pattern (Figure S3).…”

“…A good reliability of such parent-reported diagnosis has been previously demonstrated 23 . As a control we have added 48 neurotypical children 4 to 8 years of age, whose data were previously collected for a different study 13 by approaching parents on a community online site and asking if they would be willing to complete a Google form. Thus, the study included the total of 55,558 participants, the average age was 6.4 ± 2.7 years (range of 4 to 21 years), 76% participants were males.…”

“…E. g., if children were never exposed to possessive pronouns, they would not understand possessive pronouns; if they were never exposed to numbers, they would not understand the concept of numbers; and so on. Children have been usually exposed to all variety of linguistic concepts by four years of age, but, by this age, they would have also acquired most language comprehension abilities making clustering analysis of their language comprehension abilities pointless 13 .…”

Three clusters of grammatical abilities in individuals with language deficits “split” the universal grammar hypothesis

“…A good reliability of such parent-reported diagnosis has been previously demonstrated 23 . As a control we have added 48 neurotypical children 4 to 8 years of age, whose data were previously collected for a different study 22 by approaching parents on a community online site and asking if they would be willing to complete a Google form. Thus, the study included the total of 55,558 participants, the average age was 6.4±2.7 years (range of 4 to 21 years), 76% participants were males.…”