Motor Deficits in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Cross‐Syndrome Study

Abstract

Recent research suggests that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience some level of motor difficulty, and that this may be associated with social communication skills. However, other studies show that children with language impairments, but without the social communication problems, are at risk of motor difficulties as well. The aim of the present study was to determine if children with ASD have syndrome‐specific motor deficits in comparison to children with specific language impairment (SLI). We used an independent groups design with three groups of children (8–10 years old) matched on age and nonverbal IQ: an ASD group, an SLI group, and a typically developing (TD) group. All of the children completed an individually administered, standardized motor assessment battery. We found that the TD group demonstrated significantly better motor skills than either the ASD or SLI groups. Detailed analyses of the motor subtests revealed that the ASD and SLI groups had very similar motor profiles across a range of fine and gross motor skills, with one exception. We conclude that children with ASD, and SLI, are at risk of clinically significant motor deficits. However, future behavioral and neurological studies of motor skills in children with ASD should include an SLI comparison group in order to identify possible autism‐specific deficits. Autism Res 2014, 7: 664–676. © 2014 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

From movement kinematics to social cognition: the case of autism

“…In line with this, Ament et al [126] suggest that impairments in motor skills requiring the coupling of visual and temporal feedback to guide and adjust movement can differentiate ADHD, autism and developmental delay. McPhillips et al [134] have begun to extend this line of research to other developmental conditions by comparing children with autism and SLI. However, much further work is required before a 'movement signature' differentiating autism from other conditions can be identified.…”

What can autism teach us about the role of sensorimotor systems in higher cognition? New clues from studies on language, action semantics, and abstract emotional concept processing

“…Only one study investigated SLI: McPhillips et al (2014) found no significant difference in total motor skills, with the only difference being in one of the manual dexterity tasks where autistic children were significantly poorer at threading laces. This study apparently failed to control for multiple comparisons, but as this could result in false positives, the lack of difference in total motor score and subtests seems to reflect a genuine lack of difference in this group.…”

“…Failing to match groups of HFA and AS individuals on IQ casts further doubt on supposed differences between them (Ghaziuddin & Butler, 1998), and on the findings of studies which do not control for IQ between groups or consider it in their analysis (problematically, this is not always reported). Language problems are of course often related to IQ and so naturally, autistic individuals with better current and/or historic language skills tend to perform superiorly in most motor tasks (Barbeau et al, 2015;Belmonte et al, 2013;Gernsbacher et al, 2008;Hsu et al, 2004;McPhillips et al, 2014): as we shall go on to discuss, language requires motor proficiency and so this is hardly surprising. Finally, a single study previously mentioned investigated motor differences between autistic children with and without developmental regression, finding different patterns of motor impairment which may reflect different pathological processes (Ozonoff et al, 2008).…”

“…Many studies addressed this question with movement assessment batteries with normative percentiles for performance and objective scoring: for example, the PANESS (Dowell et al, 2009;Dziuk et al, 2007;Floris et al, 2016;Jansiewicz et al, 2006;Mostofsky, Burgess, & Gidley Larson, 2007), the M-ABC or M-ABC2 (Ament et al, 2015;Green, Baird et al, 2002;Green, Moore, & Reilly, 2002;Green et al, 2009;Hanaie et al, 2013;Hanaie et al, 2014;Kopp, Beckung, & Gillberg, 2010;McPhillips, Finlay, Bejerot, & Hanley, 2014;Miyahara et al, 1997;Sumner et al, 2016;Whyatt & Craig, 2012), or the Bruininks-Oseretsky test (Dewey et al, 2007;Ghaziuddin & Butler, 1998;Hilton, Zhang, Whilte, Klohr, & Constantino, 2012;Pan, 2014). These measures yield total scores which were sometimes analysed alone, but they each assess a range of fine and gross motor skills, including balance and gait, hopping or jumping, repetitive sequential movements of the hands and feet, manual dexterity and ball skills (catching and throwing).…”

“…As such, the motor profiles of these different conditions are yet to be fully ascertained (especially as all these studies have involved child samples), but the answer as to the specificity of motor disorder to autism would therefore at present have to be negative. If motor systems do play a role in higher cognitive function, the presence of motor deficits in developmental conditions such as SLI (Hill, 2001;Marton, 2009;McPhillips et al, 2014;Ullman & Pierpont, 2005;Zelaznik & Goffman, 2010), and the presence of higher cognitive deficits in conditions such as DCD (Asonitou, Koutsouki, Kourtessis, & Charitou, 2012;Dewey, Kaplan, Crawford, & Wilson, 2002;Wilson & McKenzie, 1998), is unsurprising. In the above paragraphs, we begin to observe, for example in the studies of movement planning, that movement disorder can result from disruption at one or several stages in the cognitive and underlying neural chain of movement production.…”