No abstract

Although prior research has shown that young children exhibit enhanced self-control when they use verbal strategies provided through adult instructions, little work has examined the role of children's spontaneous verbalizations or motor behavior as strategies for enhancing self-control. The present study examined the usefulness of spontaneous verbal and motor strategies for 39 3- and 4-year-old children's ability to exercise self-control during a resistance-to-temptation task. After a 2-min play period, participants were asked by an experimenter not to touch an attractive train set while he was out of the room. Children were videotaped during the 3-min waiting period and videos were coded for frequency and duration of touches, motor movements, and verbalizations. Results indicated that self-control was improved by using both motor and verbal strategies. Children who were unable to resist touching the forbidden toy used limited motor or verbal strategies. These findings add to the growing literature demonstrating the positive role of verbalizations on cognitive control and draw attention to motor behaviors as additional strategies used by young children to exercise self-control.

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder are often said to present a global pragmatic impairment. However, there is some observational evidence that context-based comprehension of indirect requests may be preserved in autism. In order to provide experimental confirmation to this hypothesis, indirect speech act comprehension was tested in a group of 15 children with autism between 7 and 12 years and a group of 20 typically developing children between 2:7 and 3:6 years. The aim of the study was to determine whether children with autism can display genuinely contextual understanding of indirect requests. The experiment consisted of a three-pronged semi-structured task involving Mr Potato Head. In the first phase a declarative sentence was uttered by one adult as an instruction to put a garment on a Mr Potato Head toy; in the second the same sentence was uttered as a comment on a picture by another speaker; in the third phase the same sentence was uttered as a comment on a picture by the first speaker. Children with autism complied with the indirect request in the first phase and demonstrated the capacity to inhibit the directive interpretation in phases 2 and 3. TD children had some difficulty in understanding the indirect instruction in phase 1. These results call for a more nuanced view of pragmatic dysfunction in autism.

Results illustrate the psychopathology of autism spectrum disorder suspected children referred to a specialized autism diagnostic service, doing so by providing us with specific clinical profiles.

Background: Autism screening remains a major challenge in most French-speaking countries. Two main issues contribute to this problematic situation: unavailability of tests in French and psychometric/ methodological weaknesses of existing instruments. These shortfalls result in late and inadequate referrals to autism specialist clinics, jeopardising both children's diagnosis and prognosis. This article describes the validation of the Autism Discriminative Tool (ADT), a teacher-rated level-two screener for children aged two to six years. It demonstrates how the ADT specific properties may help reduce actual screening challenges and improve referrals' adequacy to tertiary autism diagnostic services. Method: ADT items were prospectively tested in a community-based group (n = 118), children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD; n = 90) and non-ASD children presenting mimicking conditions such as intellectual disabilities, language impairments and various psychological disorders (n = 36). Children in the clinical samples were rated by their teacher at the beginning of a diagnostic assessment process within three specialised autism clinics. Results: results suggest that a 26-item version performs well as a stage-two screening device, with theoretical sensitivity rate of 0.83, specificity of 0.94 and an overall correct detection rate of 86.5%. Using different cut-off scores categories, results illustrate how inadequate referrals may be avoided as 44% of non-ASD children scored negatively on the questionnaire prior to their evaluation. Conclusions: based on blind teachers' ratings, the ADT appears to be a good complementary device to help French-speaking clinicians identify preschoolers needing multidisciplinary ASD diagnostic assessment.