The development of an expressive language score for people with autism based on the ADOS-2 was recently reported by Mazurek et al. (2019). The current study examined the construct validity of the ADOS-2 expressive language score (ELS) in a sample of adolescents with fragile X syndrome (n = 45, 10 girls), a neurodevelopmental disorder with high…

Background: The Taiwan version of the Screening Tool for Autism in Two-Year-Olds (T-STAT) had been developed for identifying autism disorder (AD) in children aged 24-35 months. Two studies were performed to elucidate its utility for AD in children aged 36-48 months. Method: In Study 1, the receiver operating characteristics were utilised to select…

Peer interaction can be challenging in autism spectrum disorder, but naturalistic peer-observation scales for preschoolers are scarce. This study examined psychometric qualities of the newly developed Autism Peer Interaction Observation Scale. We tested the Autism Peer Interaction Observation Scale to (a) characterize peer interactions of…

This study examined whether a novel parent-report questionnaire, the Autism Parent Screen for Infants, could differentiate infants subsequently diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder from a high-risk cohort (siblings of children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (n = 66)) from high-risk and low-risk comparison infants (no family history of…

Joint attention, or the shared focus of attention between objects or events and a social partner, is a crucial milestone in the development of social communication and a notable area of deficit in children with autism spectrum disorder. While valid parent-report screening measures of social communication are available, the majority of these…

The Social Attribution Task, Multiple Choice is introduced as a measure of implicit social cognitive ability in children, addressing a key challenge in quantification of social cognitive function in autism spectrum disorder, whereby individuals can often be successful in explicit social scenarios, despite marked social adaptive deficits. The…

The purpose of the study was to evaluate the use of the iPod Touch™ as a Speech Generated Device (SGD) for Functional Communication Training (FCT). The evaluation of the effects on problem behavior, the effects on generalization and maintenance of the acquired communication repertoire, and the social initiations of peers between the new SGD (iPod…

Social-emotional comprehension includes the ability to encode, interpret, and reason about social-emotional information. The better developed children's social-emotional comprehension, the more positive their social interactions and the better their peer relationships. Many clinical tools exist to assess children's social behavior. In contrast,…