Group items tagged

Leo Lytel was diagnosed with autism as a toddler. But by age 9 he had overcome the disorder. His progress is part of a growing body of research that suggests at least 10 percent of children with autism can "recover" from it - most of them after undergoing years of intensive behavioral therapy.

She presented research this week at an autism conference in Chicago that included 20 children who, according to rigorous analysis, got a correct diagnosis but years later were no longer considered autistic.

Skeptics question the phenomenon, but University of Connecticut psychology professor Deborah Fein is among those convinced it's real.

The ASD performed worse than the typically developing group across the entire grammaticality judgment task. However, the authors noted that the groups did NOT differ when the sentences were short or medium length. That is, the apparent relative weaker performance among the ASD group was mostly during long sentences. In addition, these group differences were more pronounced when the error was located at the end of long sentences. This indicates that the group differences may be due to difficulty in working memory and attention among the autism group.

However, it is unlikely that these findings are only attributable to working memory problems. Specifically, the ASD groups showed impaired performance only to some type grammatical errors but not others. That is, the ASD group had difficulty identifying omissions and substitution errors, but did not show difficulty identifying order or insertion errors. This suggests that attention and working memory difficulties interact with some unique deficits in grammaticality judgment.

I don’t have Lynn Koegel at my side so these are the answers of a mom who’s been through a lot of this and NOT of an autism expert who runs a clinic, so any mistakes I make are my own, not hers!

But the whole point of speech is to nail down that one-to-one correlation between the sound and the object it represents.

As far as the “up” thing goes, one thing that Lynn and I strongly agree on is that even though kids with special needs may at times require special attention, they also need to learn that the world doesn’t revolve around them–just like every kid needs to learn.

A brief review of Annaz, D., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Johnson, M., & Thomas, M. (2009). A cross-syndrome study of the development of holistic face recognition in children with autism, Down syndrome, and Williams syndrome Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 102 (4), 456-486 DOI: 10.1016/j.jecp.2008.11.005

33 kids with autism

15 children with Williams syndrome

The authors found that 11% of the typically developing children and 31% of the ASD had a documented visual impairment (myopia, astigmatism, etc). This difference was statistically significant. That is, children with ASD were significantly more likely than typically developing children to have these conditions. Children with autism also displayed significantly poorer visual acuity (but within normal limits), and lower convergence. Convergence refers to the process by which the eyes move towards each other to maintain focus on approaching or close-range objects.

The findings of reduced visual acuity in children with autism when compared to typically developing children contradict previous studies that have shown enhanced visual acuity in autism. This brings us to a major limitation of this study that was correctly noted by the authors.

Limited convergence therefore would be associated with more limited depth perception. I find this intriguing because the neuropsychological profile of children with high functioning autism is often very similar to what is observed in kids with non-verbal learning disabilities (including relative weaknesses in motor-visual functioning). In addition, many parents with children with ASD report that their kids have trouble with sports and other physical activities. I thus wonder how much the reduced convergence observed in ASD may affect the motor-visual functioning in autism.