“Communicative skills in Spanish children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Analysis through parents’ perceptions and narrative production”

Abstract

Communicative skills in Spanish children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Analysis through parents' perceptions and narrative production 1. Introduction Recent studies have highlighted the diagnostic conundrum that clinicians often face when establishing differential diagnoses of verbally fluent school-age children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (Grzadzinski, Dick, Lord, & Bishop, 2016). These two neurodevepmental disorders show a high co-occurrence; in fact, there is an overlap in genetic, neurobiological and neuropsychological bases, such as executive functioning or theory of mind skills (Miranda, Baixauli, Colomer y Roselló, 2013). One relevant aspect that can shed light on this complex topic is the analysis of communication. Persistent deficits in social communication are present across the autism spectrum (Schuh, Eigsti, & Mirman, 2016) and, even if they are not included in the core diagnostic criteria, language and pragmatic disturbances may often occur in ADHD (Bellani, Moretti, Perlini, & Brambilla, 2011; Green, Johnson, & Bretherton, 2014). Studies that have compared the communicative competence in ADHD and in ASD (specifically, high functioning autism, without language impairment) have mainly used the Children's Communication Checklist (CCC-2) (Bishop, 2003), designed to assess social-communicative impairments in daily interactions. Research has found similar deficits in both populations on coherence and inappropriate initiations. However, they do not seem to be as severe in ADHD as in ASD, where the impairment is more pronounced in the interpretation of the context, nonverbal communication, and stereotyped language (

Executive Functions and Morphosyntax: Distinguishing DLD From ADHD in French-Speaking Children

“…It should also be pointed out that although children with ADHD and TD children could not be distinguished based on parental rankings of morphosyntax in Helland et al (2012), children with ADHD did nonetheless demonstrate poorer performance on the morphosyntactic subscales than their TD peers, a pattern that also emerged in Geurts and Embrechts (2008). It is thus possible that children with ADHD demonstrate modest morphosyntactic difficulties, which would explain the results reported by Väisänen et al (2014) and Fortea et al (2018), but that these difficulties are not comparable in severity to those displayed by children with DLD.…”

“…It is also worth noting that several crosslinguistic studies have examined the morphosyntactic competences of schoolaged children with ADHD using Bishop's (2003) Children's Communication Checklist-Second Edition (see Fortea et al, 2018 for Spanish, Geurts and Embrechts, 2008for Dutch, Helland et al, 2012for Norwegian, and Väisänen et al, 2014 for Finnish). Again, findings are inconsistent as Väisänen et al (2014) and Fortea et al (2018) report morphosyntactic weakness for children with ADHD when compared to their TD peers, whereas children with ADHD could not be distinguished from the TD group in the studies by Geurts and Embrechts (2008) and Helland et al (2012).…”

“…It is also worth noting that several crosslinguistic studies have examined the morphosyntactic competences of schoolaged children with ADHD using Bishop's (2003) Children's Communication Checklist-Second Edition (see Fortea et al, 2018 for Spanish, Geurts and Embrechts, 2008for Dutch, Helland et al, 2012for Norwegian, and Väisänen et al, 2014 for Finnish). Again, findings are inconsistent as Väisänen et al (2014) and Fortea et al (2018) report morphosyntactic weakness for children with ADHD when compared to their TD peers, whereas children with ADHD could not be distinguished from the TD group in the studies by Geurts and Embrechts (2008) and Helland et al (2012). Furthermore, Helland et al (2012) compared the scores of children with ADHD to those of agematched children with DLD (N ADHD = 21, M ADHD = 10;1 and N DLD = 19, M DLD = 8;7) and found that while there was an overlap between the two groups for some language subscales included in the questionnaire (e.g., semantics, coherence, use of context), the two groups could be statistically discriminated based on the morphosyntactic scores that emerged: morphosyntax was ranked as intact by parents of children with ADHD but as impaired by parents of children with DLD.…”

Character Reference Choice in the Narratives by Persian-speaking Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…Despite some similarities in language abilities [25,37,38], various studies reported a wide variety of linguistic differences and impairments for children with ASD [39][40][41], particularly in the discursive and pragmatic aspects, in which various kinds of rules and processes govern the contextual suitability of language [42][43][44][45][46]. Some literature on referential choices made by children with ASD proposed that, due to impairments in attention, working memory, mental processes and difficulties in using pronouns, they tended to adhere their narratives to the explicit referential expressions such as full lexical noun phrases [18,47].…”

Parental Report versus Standardized Test as Measures of Language Improvement After Intervention in Children at Risk for ADHD

“…This parental measure was designed for children between the ages 4 and 16 whose primary language is English. The CCC-2 contains 70 items grouped in 10 subscales measuring various aspects of communication: language (speech, syntax, semantics, coherence), pragmatics (inappropriate initiation, stereotyped language, the use of context, and non-verbal communication), and two scales assess the behaviors that are affected in children with ASD (social relationships and interests) (Fortea et al, 2018). In a study conducted by Timler (2014), significant correlations were found when the CCC-2 and the CELF-4 scores were compared, suggesting that the CCC-2 can accurately classify students with ADHD and concurrent LI.…”