When partners coordinate their movement in time and space to reach a goal, they perform joint action, an important part of every interaction. Joint action involves motor abilities and socio-cognitive skills like theory of mind. Autistic children's lower joint motor coordination (joint action) abilities as well as their motor functioning and theory…

Sensorimotor difficulties are common in children with autism spectrum disorder, and it has been suggested that motor planning problems underlie their atypical movements. At early school-age, motor planning development typically involves changes in visuomotor integration, a function known to be affected in autism spectrum disorder. However, there…

We leveraged nationally representative data from the Panel study of Income Dynamics-Child Development Supplement (N = 3,562) and the Early Childhood Longitudinal study (N = 18,174), to chart the development of working memory, indexed via verbal forward and backward digit span task performance, from 3 to 19 years of age. Results revealed nonlinear…

Keeping a conversation going is the social glue of friendships. The DSM criteria for autism list difficulties with back-and-forth conversation but does not necessitate that all autistic children will be equally impacted. We carried out three studies (two pre-registered) with verbally fluent school children (age 5-9 years) to investigate how…

This study investigated the systematic rise in cognitive ability scores over generations, known as the "Flynn Effect," across middle childhood and early adolescence (7-15 years; 291 monozygotic pairs, 298 dizygotic pairs; 89% White). Leveraging the unique structure of the Louisville Twin Study (longitudinal data collected continuously…

Studies have shown that there are differences between the presentations of males and females diagnosed with autism. There remains a developing understanding about how the presentation of autism differs between boys (hereafter referred to as 'assigned males at birth') and girls (assigned females at birth). This study sought to investigate the…

Objective: To determine the demographic and clinical characteristics of children followed up with the diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at a tertiary center in Southeeast Turkey. Methods: Children followed up with the diagnosis of ASD at a university hospital child psychiatry clinic between June 2016 and June 2021 were evaluated…

The Woodcock-Johnson IV Tests of Cognitive Abilities (WJ IV COG) is a comprehensive assessment battery designed to assess broad and narrow cognitive abilities, as defined by the Cattell-Horn-Carroll (CHC) theory of intelligence. Previous studies examined the invariance of the WJ assessments across sex and age groups using factor analytic methods.…

This study examined the factor structure of executive control throughout elementary school, as well as associations between executive control abilities in preschool and elementary school. Data were drawn from a longitudinal study of executive control development in a community sample of children (N = 294; 53% female, 47% male) oversampled for low…

Motor abnormalities are highly prevalent in children with autism spectrum disorder and are strongly predictive of adaptive functioning. Despite the documented sex bias in the prevalence of the disorder, the impact of sex differences on motor abnormalities has been overlooked. The goal of this study was to investigate differences in the motor…

We evaluated whether maternal parenting strategies (maternal achievement-oriented control and maternal monitoring) and maternal teaching strategies are related to children's academic competence in middle childhood. We also assessed whether the relations of maternal parenting strategies with children's academic competence are mediated by maternal…

This study investigated the factorial invariance of the Taiwan Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fifth Edition (WISC-V) across age and gender. A higher order five-factor model was tested on a nationally representative sample of 1,034 children aged 6-16 years. The results demonstrated full factorial invariance for Taiwan children of…

Though experiencing maltreatment (abuse or neglect) appears to be common in students with the special education label of emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD), little research has been devoted to this topic by EBD educators. This paper uses archived file drawer data from 1992 that focuses on 149 students newly classified with EBD for whom a…

Backgrounds and aims: Early symbolic play abilities are closely related to long-term language development for both autistic and non-autistic children, but few studies have explored these relations for different dimensions of pretence and of language. The current study explores carer-reported measures of solitary symbolic play, object substitution…

The processing speed index (PSI) of the Wechsler intelligence scale for children (WISC-IV) has been found to predict a child's level of academic functioning. The consistently reported PSI weakness in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) therefore warrants special assistance and attempts at compensation for the disadvantages associated with…