This research addresses the challenges of assessing receptive language abilities in minimally verbal children with autism spectrum disorder by comparing several adapted measurement tools: a standardized direct assessment of receptive vocabulary (i.e. Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test-4); caregiver report measures including scores on the Vineland-II…

We present results obtained with new instrumental methods for the acoustic analysis of prosody to evaluate prosody production by children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Typical Development (TD). Two tasks elicit focal stress--one in a vocal imitation paradigm, the other in a picture-description paradigm; a third task also uses a vocal…

Background: Early diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is of crucial importance, but lengthy delays are common. We examined whether this issue could be reliably addressed by local teams trained by a specialist ASD assessment team. Method: Four local teams were trained in diagnostic assessment. Their assessments of 38 children and young…

The psychometric properties of a questionnaire developed to assess symptoms of anxiety disorders (SCARED-71) were compared between two groups of children: children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder and comorbid anxiety disorders (ASD-group; "n" = 115), and children with anxiety disorders (AD-group; "n" = 122).…

Children on the autism spectrum often demonstrate atypical joint attention, leading some researchers to consider joint attention deficits a core feature of the autism spectrum. Structured measures, such as the Early Social Communication Scales (ESCS), are commonly used to provide a metric of joint attention. To explore the assessment of joint…

This article tests the hypothesis that individuals with autism poorly encode verbal information to the semantic level of processing, instead paying greater attention to phonological attributes. Participants undertook a novel explicit verbal recall task. Twenty children with autism were compared with 20 matched typically developing children. On…

This study examined progress after 1 year of treatment for children with autism who received a mean of 36 hours per week one-to-one University of California at Los Angeles Applied Behavior Analysis (UCLA ABA) treatment. Two types of service provision were compared: an intensive clinic based treatment model with all treatment personnel (N = 23),…