Parent Report of Communication Skills of Jamaican Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Pilot Study

Abstract

Most research related to communication skills in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been obtained from monolingual English-speaking children from high-income countries. Based on questionnaires completed by parents, this pilot study aimed to describe the communication characteristics of six children with ASD living in Jamaica. Parents had concerns about their child’s speech intelligibility, expressive language, and social communication. All children were reported to speak using Standard Jamaican English (SJE). Exposure to SJE and Jamaican Creole (JC) was reported by half of the parents. Emergent literacy was considered a relative strength. All parents reported that their child could recite the alphabet and identify some letters and that family members also helped their child print and read letters or words. Other aspects of the home literacy environment and early literacy skills were varied. Information from this group provides some insights into communication skills in children with ASD from Caribbean backgrounds.

Intelligibility in Context Scale: cross-linguistic use, validity, and reliability

“…A review of literature since 2012 illustrates that the ICS has been used in at least five ways. Firstly, the ICS has been used to describe the intelligibility of children (Burton, Washington, & Samms-Vaughan, 2018;Hoàng, Trà, & Cao, 2014;McCormack, McLeod, & Crowe, 2019) and adults (Crowe, Marschark, & McLeod, 2019). For example, the ICS was used to compare parents and children's perspectives about talking (McCormack et al, 2019), Secondly, the ICS has been used as a screening tool (McLeod, Harrison, McAllister, & McCormack, 2013).…”

Assessing communicative participation in preschool children with the Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six: a scoping review

“…Community speech-language pathology clinics (n=16) 13,15,16,[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26]29,[37][38][39] Kindergarten classrooms (n=3) 35,40,41 Early childhood education centers (n=3) 28,33,42 Developmental-behavioral pediatric clinic (n=1) 32 Community SLPs (n=2) 27,34…”

“…Original 50-item FOCUS (n=20) 13,15,16,[18][19][20][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][32][33][34][35][37][38][39] FOCUS-F (n=1) 42 FOCUS-G (n=1) 41 FOCUS-I (n=1) 40 FOCUS-34 (n=2) 20,21 FOCUS Thomas-Stonell et al 15 Case series 4 Thomas-Stonell et al 16 Case series 4 Hidecker et al 19 Case series 4 Kwok et al 20 Case series 4 Cunningham et al 21 Case series 4 Thomas-Stonell et al 22 Case series 4 Washington et al 23 Cohort 3 Washington et al 24 Cohort 3 Namasivayam et al 26 Cohort 3 Pennington et al 27 Case series 4 McLeod et al 28 Randomized trial 2 Namasivayam et al 29 Cohort 3 Washington et al 38 Case series 4…”

“…35 One study calculated and reported averages for total and profile scores to quantify communicative participation. 32 It is not incorrect to present average total FOCUS scores for groups of children (e.g. to show equality between treatment and comparison groups), but FOCUS profile scores should be included as a clinical tool to determine where change occurred; they were not developed or validated to detect change.…”

“…Use as a descriptive tool (n=3) [32][33][34] Use as a discriminative tool (n=1) 35 Use outside the validated age range Use with children >5y11mo (n=3) 24,27,34 Use with children <18mo (n=4) [19][20][21][22] Other adaptations Using only some FOCUS questions (n=1) 34 Use with typically developing children (n=1) 40 on the FOCUS. 35 Although the FOCUS has not been validated for this purpose, it may be useful for documenting the functional impact of a child's language impairment, a requirement for diagnosing developmental language disorder.…”