Comparison between the Clancy Behavior Scale and the Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers in Taiwan.

(1) Background: Precise diagnosis and early intervention are crucial for toddlers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to achieve a better prognosis. This study investigated the efficacy of the Clancy Behavior Scale (CBS) and Modified Checklist for Autism in Toddlers (M-CHAT) in detecting ASD among toddlers under 30 months of age. (2) Methods: A total of 215 toddlers (117 with ASD and 98 with development delays) aged between 18 and 29 months participated in this study. All the primary caregivers of these toddlers were recruited to complete the CBS and M-CHAT. (3) Results: The findings indicated that the accuracy of the CBS and M-CHAT was promising, and the short forms of these two instruments performed better than their full versions. The CBS:9 critical items presented a sensitivity of 0.75 and a specificity of 0.74, while the M-CHAT:14 brief items showed a sensitivity of 0.72 and a specificity of 0.85. (4) Conclusions: The diagnostic accuracy of high-risk ASD toddlers improved via the combination of CBS and M-CHAT, particularly when the information gathered from these two instruments were consistent. The findings may provide implications for enhancing the early detection of ASD.

A Longitudinal Study of Joint Attention, Motor Imitation and Language Development in Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder in Taiwan.

This longitudinal study examined early predictors of language development in 74 young children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in Taiwan. Participants were assessed twice (initial age between 17 and 35 months) on responding to joint attention (RJA), initiating joint attention (IJA), motor imitation with objects (object imitation; OI) and without objects (manual imitation; MI), and receptive and expressive language. The two assessments were 18 months apart. Results showed that both RJA and MI concurrently and longitudinally predicted receptive and expressive language across the two assessments. These findings were not entirely consistent with the limited and mixed findings of Western longitudinal studies. However, they have implications for early interventions aiming to facilitate language development in children with ASD internationally.

Language development trajectories in young children with developmental disabilities in Taiwan.

BACKGROUND: Language development is critical to various outcomes in young children with developmental disabilities (DD), including autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and non-ASD delays. However, language development trajectories in young children with DD in non-Western populations remain unclear. AIMS: To investigate the language development trajectories of young children with DD in Taiwan. We investigated the relationship between trajectory class assignment and diagnostic outcomes (ASD or non-ASD delays) at 3 years after enrollment in the study and the differences in early abilities among children in different trajectory classes. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: The participants were 101 young children with DD (mean age: 21.88 months; follow-up: 1.5 and 3 years after enrollment). Growth mixture modeling analyses were conducted to receptive language developmental quotients (RLDQ) and expressive language developmental quotients (ELDQ) on the basis of the Mullen Scales of Early Learning. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: Three RLDQ trajectories were identified, namely age expected, delayed catch-up, and delayed, and two ELDQ trajectories were identified, namely delayed improve and delayed. Trajectory class assignment was related to diagnostic outcomes. Children who demonstrated more proficient skills at the early time point, demonstrated improved language outcomes 3 years later. However, adaptive functioning did not differ between the two ELDQ trajectory classes. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: Language development in young children with DD in Taiwan is heterogeneous. Delayed receptive and expressive language development trajectories relate to later ASD diagnoses.

Studies on Children With Developmental Coordination Disorder in the Past 20 Years: A Bibliometric Analysis via CiteSpace.

Children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD) have been commonly observed and drawn an increasing amount of attention over the past decades. The aim of the present study is to evaluate the origin, current hotspots, and research trends on children with DCD using a bibliometric tool. After searching with "children" and "developmental coordination disorder" as the "topic" and "title" words, respectively, 635 original articles with 12,559 references were obtained from the electronic databases, Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC). CiteSpace V.5.7.R2 was used to perform the analysis. The number of publications in this field was increasing over the past two decades. John Cairney from the Department of Family Medicine, McMaster University, Canada, was found to be the most productive researcher. Meanwhile, McMaster University and Canada were the most productive research institution and country, respectively. Reference and journal co-citation analyses revealed the top landmark articles and clusters in this field. Clumsiness was the most strength burst keyword. Moreover, task, meta-analysis, difficulty, adult, and impact will be the active research hotspots in future. These findings provide the trends and frontiers in the field of children with DCD, and valuable information for clinicians and scientists to identify new perspectives with potential collaborators and cooperative countries.

Concurrent visual learning of adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies in adults and children.

Concurrent learning of adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies has been shown in adults only. This study extended this line of research by examining dependency-specific learning for both adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies concurrently in both adults and children. Seventy adults aged 18 to 64 (40 women, 30 men; Experiment 1) and 64 children aged 10 to 11 years (40 girls, 24 boys; Experiment 2) were tested with a new serial reaction time (SRT) task in which they were trained for 5-8 min on materials comprising equally probable adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies. They were then asked to discriminate between trained and untrained dependencies in a familiarity task. Both adults and children showed implicit concurrent learning of both adjacent and nonadjacent dependencies. The two dependency types were learned to the same extent. However, adults showed a rapid, sustainable, and dependency-specific sensitivity throughout the SRT task while children only showed a dependency-specific sensitivity to violations of expectations after exposure. When the two groups were statistically compared, only adults showed a dependency-specific learning effect after exposure. These findings are in line with the age-related improvement model of dependency learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Parenting Stress and Child Behavior Problems in Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Transactional Relations Across Time.

This longitudinal study examined the transactional relations between parenting stress and both internalizing and externalizing behavioral problems in young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) over 1.5 years using a cross-lagged panel analysis. Participants included 75 young children with ASD (Time 1; mean age = 25.68 months) and their parents. Parenting stress that was related to parent's perceptions on child characteristics was found to predict externalizing behavioral problems in young children with ASD across two time points. However, behavioral problems in young children with ASD did not predict parenting stress. These findings provide implications for early intervention and family services for young children with ASD and their families.

T-STAT for detecting autism spectrum disorder in toddlers aged 18-24 months.

LAY ABSTRACT: The benefits of early intervention for young children with autism spectrum disorder highlight the importance of early diagnosis. Reliable diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder can be made before 24 months of age. However, many children are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at a later age. Delayed diagnosis can occur for children with less severe symptoms and lead to missed opportunities for early intervention. This current study was executed to examine the Taiwanese version of the Screening Tool for Autism in Two-Year-Olds in detecting autism spectrum disorder in toddlers between 18 and 24 months of age. One strength of this study was the inclusion of toddlers with autism spectrum disorder or mild-autism spectrum disorder using the strict and relaxed Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.) criteria for autism spectrum disorder simultaneously. The results of this study supported that diagnosis of toddlers with autism spectrum disorder could be made reliable before 24 months of age. And the Taiwanese version of the Screening Tool for Autism in Two-Year-Olds was a Level 2 autism-specific screening tool for toddlers aged from 18 to 24 months in Taiwan.

Does short-term memory develop?

Such is the consistency by which performance on measures of short-term memory (STM) increase with age that developmental increases in STM capacity are largely accepted as fact. However, our analysis of a robust but almost ignored finding - that span for digit sequences (the traditional measure of STM) increases at a far greater rate than span for other verbal material - fundamentally undermines the assumption that increased performance in STM tasks is underpinned by developmental increases in capacity. We show that this digit superiority with age effect is explained by the relatively greater linguistic exposure to random sequences of digits versus other stimuli such as words. A simple associative learning process that learns incrementally from exposure to language accounts for the effect, without any need to invoke an STM mechanism, much less one that increases in capacity with age. By extension, using corpus data directed at 2-3 year old children, 4-6 year old children, and adults, we show that age-related performance increases with other types of verbal material are equally driven by the same basic associative learning process operating on the expanding exposure to language experienced by the child. Our results question the idea that tests such as digit span are measuring a dedicated system for the temporary maintenance and manipulation of verbal material, and as such have implications for our understanding of those aspects of typical and atypical development that are usually accounted for with respect to the operation of such a system.

Parenting stress and depressive symptoms in Taiwanese mothers of young children with autism spectrum disorder: Association with children's behavioural problems.

BACKGROUND: This study examined the severity of parenting stress and depressive symptoms in Taiwanese mothers of young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to mothers of young children with developmental delay (DD). The associations between parenting stress, depressive symptoms, and children's behavioural problems were also tested. METHODS: The study sample included 51 young children with ASD (mean age = 31 months), 51 young children with DD (mean age = 30 months) and their mothers. RESULTS: The results confirmed that mothers of young children with ASD experienced higher levels of parenting stress and depressive symptoms than mothers of young children with DD. In addition, children's behavioural problems were robust predictors of parenting stress and depressive symptoms in mothers of young children with ASD, but not in mothers of young children with DD. CONCLUSION: The findings indicated that one of the critical goals in early intervention for young children with ASD and their families is to reduce children's behavioural problems.

Brief Report: Discrimination of Foreign Speech Pitch and Autistic Traits in Non-Clinical Population.

Individuals with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) are widely suggested to show enhanced perceptual discrimination but inconsistent findings have been reported for pitch discrimination. Given the high variability in ASC, this study investigated whether ASC traits were correlated with pitch discrimination in an undergraduate sample when musical and language experiences were taken into consideration. Results indicated that the social skills subscale of the Autism Spectrum Quotient was associated with foreign speech pitch discrimination, suggesting that individuals who were less sociable and socially skillful were less able to discriminate foreign speech pitch. Current findings have an implication in investigating individual differences in ASC and further investigation is needed for spelling out the relationship between the non-social and social aspects of ASC.

Nonadjacent Dependency Learning in Cantonese-Speaking Children With and Without a History of Specific Language Impairment.

Purpose: This study investigated nonadjacent dependency learning in Cantonese-speaking children with and without a history of specific language impairment (SLI) in an artificial linguistic context. Method: Sixteen Cantonese-speaking children with a history of SLI and 16 Cantonese-speaking children with typical language development (TLD) were tested with a nonadjacent dependency learning task using artificial languages that mimic Cantonese. Results: Children with TLD performed above chance and were able to discriminate between trained and untrained nonadjacent dependencies. However, children with a history of SLI performed at chance and were not able to differentiate trained versus untrained nonadjacent dependencies. Conclusions: These findings, together with previous findings from English-speaking adults and adolescents with language impairments, suggest that individuals with atypical language development, regardless of age, diagnostic status, language, and culture, show difficulties in learning nonadjacent dependencies. This study provides evidence for early impairments to statistical learning in individuals with atypical language development.

Nonspecificity and theory of mind: new evidence from a nonverbal false-sign task and children with autism spectrum disorders.

Understanding of false belief has long been considered to be a crucial aspect of "theory of mind" that can be explained by a domain-specific mechanism. We argue against this claim using new evidence from a nonverbal false representation task (false-sign task) with typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Experiments 1 and 2 showed that typically developing children (mean age=62.67months) were equivalent in their performance across nonverbal and verbal forms of both the false-belief and false-sign tasks. Results for these two misrepresentation tasks differed from the results of an outdated representation task ("false"-photograph task). Experiment 3 showed that children with ASD had difficulties with the false representation tasks, and this could not be explained by executive functioning or language impairments. These findings support the view that children with ASD might not have a specific theory-of-mind deficit.

False memory and schizophrenia: evidence for gist memory impairment.

BACKGROUND: In this study we examined patients' false memory, that is memory for a non-presented event, to search for a further source of converging evidence for the impairment of semantic memory in individuals with schizophrenia. In two experiments we compared the pattern of false memory created by the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm between individuals with schizophrenia and those of a normal control group. METHOD: Experiment 1 tested participants on both recall and recognition of lists of semantically related words. Experiment 2 adopted the meaning recognition test, in addition to the standard recognition test, to assess the participants' gist memory. RESULTS: Individuals with schizophrenia performed worse than normal controls on both recall and recognition of studied words. The schizophrenia patients had higher rates of false recall and false recognition for semantically unrelated words than did the normal controls, suggesting an abnormal pattern of semantic activation in the former group. More importantly, no differences were found between the two groups with regard to false recall and false recognition of semantically related words. When the participants were tested for meaning recognition, however, the schizophrenia patients gave fewer 'old' responses to non-studied semantically related words than did the control group, indicating an impaired gist memory in schizophrenia patients. CONCLUSIONS: When asked to consciously retrieve word lists, individuals with schizophrenia showed impairment not only in item-specific memory but also in gist memory. The pattern of results is consistent with the storage deficit view of semantic memory in schizophrenia.