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Longitudinal Analyses of Expressive Language Development Reveal Two Distinct Language Profiles Among Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

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Abstract

Although children with Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) show significant variation in language skills, research on what type(s) of language profiles they demonstrate has been limited. Using growth-curve analyses, we investigated how different groups of young children with ASD show increases in the size of their lexicon, morpho-syntactic production as measured by Brown’s 14 grammatical morphemes, and wh-question complexity, compared to TD children, across six time points. Children with ASD who had higher verbal skills were comparable to TD children on most language measures, whereas the children with ASD who had low verbal skills had flatter trajectories in most language measures. Thus, two distinct language profiles emerged for children with ASD.

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Notes

  1. Although the term ASD includes a group of disorders that are classified as pervasive developmental disorders in the DSM-IV-TR (APA 2000), this study reports findings from children with a diagnosis of autistic disorder or pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) according to DSM-IV criteria. Therefore, unless specified otherwise, the term ASD in this paper mostly refers to children with a diagnosis of autism and PDD-NOS.

  2. We did not use t scores of the MSEL Expressive Language Scale to match the groups, as they were not matched in chronological age (Mervis and Klein-Tasman 2004). We recruited young children with ASD to investigate early language acquisition in this population, as soon as possible after a diagnosis was obtained. However, because the average age of ASD diagnosis is around four in United States (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2012), the mean age for this group of early-diagnosed children was 32.85 months at visit 1. We recruited TD controls whose expressive language was on par with children with ASD, but they were younger than the ASD group. We also did not use age-equivalency scores of the MSEL, because the age-equivalency scores are on ordinal scale, which can make the analysis using these scores less interpretable or meaningful compared to raw scores, which are on interval scale (Mervis and Klein-Tasman 2004).

Abbreviations

ASD:

Autism spectrum disorders

ASD-HV:

ASD-high verbal

ASD-LV:

ASD-low verbal

TD:

Typically developing

SLI:

Specific language impairment

DSM IV-TR:

Diagnostic and statistical manual IV, text revision

ADOS:

Autism diagnostic observation schedule

CDI:

MacArthur communicative development inventory

MSEL:

Mullen scales of early learning

IGC:

Individual growth curves

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders: NIHDCD, R01 2DC007428 to the principal investigator, by a Student Undergraduate Research Fund (SURF) at our institute to the second author of this paper, and by a Doctoral Dissertation fellowship to the first author of the paper. We gratefully acknowledge our lab managers in data collection and the undergraduates in our lab in transcribing, as well as the children and families who participated in the study. We appreciate the helpful commentary received from many colleagues.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Psychology Department, Bilkent University, Bilkent, 06800, Ankara, Turkey

    Saime Tek

  2. Brown University, 190 Thayer Street, Providence, RI, 02912, USA

    Laura Mesite

  3. University of Connecticut, 406 Babbidge Road, Unit 1020, Storrs, CT, 06269-1020, USA

    Deborah Fein & Letitia Naigles

Authors
  1. Saime Tek
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  2. Laura Mesite
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  3. Deborah Fein
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  4. Letitia Naigles
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Correspondence to Saime Tek.

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Table 6.

Table 6 Spontaneous language scores as percentages of total utterances, TD
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Appendix 2

See Table 7.

Table 7 Spontaneous language scores as percentages of total utterances, ASD-HV
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Appendix 3

See Table 8.

Table 8 Spontaneous language scores as percentages of total utterances, ASD-LV
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Tek, S., Mesite, L., Fein, D. et al. Longitudinal Analyses of Expressive Language Development Reveal Two Distinct Language Profiles Among Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders . J Autism Dev Disord 44, 75–89 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-013-1853-4

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