Studies investigating the development of tense/aspect in children with developmental disorders have focused on production frequency and/or relied on short spontaneous speech samples. How children with developmental disorders use future forms/constructions is also unknown. The current study expands this literature by examining frequency,…

The ability to engage in positive social interactions is an important goal for young children with developmental disabilities (DDs). Peer-mediated intervention (PMI), one category of interventions often employed with those who show social skill deficits, involves use of typical peers who live model appropriate behaviors. A second frequent category…

This study evaluated the extent to which developmental change in coordination of social communication in early infancy differentiates children eventually diagnosed with ASD from those not likely to develop the disorder. A prospective longitudinal design was used to compare nine infants at heightened risk for ASD (HR) later diagnosed with ASD, to…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders have impairments in language acquisition, but the underlying mechanism of these deficits is poorly understood. Implicit learning is potentially relevant to language development, particularly in speech segmentation, which relies on sensitivity to transitional probabilities between speech sounds. This study…

The Social Attention and Communication Study involved the successful implementation of developmental surveillance of the early markers of autism spectrum disorders in a community-based setting. The objective in the current study was to determine the most discriminating and predictive markers of autism spectrum disorders used in the Social…

This study investigates whether distinct neurodevelopmental disorders show distinct patterns of impairments in particular grammatical abilities and the relation of those grammatical patterns to general language delays and intellectual disabilities. We studied two disorders (autism and Williams syndrome [WS]) and two distinct properties (Principle…

Aim: The aim of this study was to characterize the auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) of young children with suspected autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and compare them with the ABRs of children with language delay and with clinical norms. Method: The ABRs of 26 children with suspected ASDs (21 males, five females; mean age 32.5 mo) and an age-…

This study compared language development in 30-month-old toddlers on the autism spectrum and 25-month-old late talking toddlers without autism. Groups were matched on overall productive vocabulary (and nonverbal cognition was controlled) in order to compare language acquisition patterns related to vocabulary composition and early…

Objective: Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are highly heritable neurodevelopmental disorders that onset clinically during the first years of life. ASD risk biomarkers expressed early in life could significantly impact diagnosis and treatment, but no transcriptome-wide biomarker classifiers derived from fresh blood samples from children with…

Several screening instruments for ASD in young children were developed during the last decades. Only few studies compare the discriminative power of these instruments in the same sample. In particular comparisons of instruments that use different informants are scarce in young children. The current study compared the discriminant ability of the…

This study characterized early language abilities in toddlers with autism spectrum disorders (n = 257) using multiple measures of language development, compared to toddlers with non-spectrum developmental delay (DD, n = 69). Findings indicated moderate to high degrees of agreement among three assessment measures (one parent report and two direct…

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have been gaining attention, partly as an example of unusual developmental trajectories related to early neurobiological differences. The present investigation addressed the process of learning new words to explore mechanisms of language delay and impairment. The sample included 21 typically developing toddlers…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the concurrent validity of subtests on the "Comprehensive Assessment of Spoken Language" (CASL) by comparing them with the assessment of communication and social skills on the "Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales" ("Vineland"). The participants were 35 children and…

Infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are at elevated risk for social, cognitive, and language delays which may cause parents to become hypervigilant (i.e., excessively worried) about their infant's development. The extent to which parental concern is related to actual cognitive or language impairment in these infants is…

Neuropsychological functioning of 30 siblings of children with autism (AU-S), 28 siblings of children with mental retardation of (MR-S), and 30 siblings of children with developmental language delay (DLD-S) was compared. Two siblings, both AU-S, received diagnoses of pervasive developmental disorder (PDD). More siblings with cognitive disabilities…