Brief report: Brief syntactic analysis in Asperger syndrome: a preliminary study.

The study was conducted at the University of Michigan Developmental Disorders Clinic. Subjects with AS consisted of those who met the criteria for that disorder (ICD-10; World Health Organization [WHO], 1993). These were consecutive referrals with pervasive developmental disorders who showed evidence of autistic social dysfunction and idiosyncratic interests with a full-scale IQ of 70 or above (n = 15; 12 male; 3 female; M age:16.2 years; M full-scale IQ: 96) without evidence of language delay (phrase speech by 3 years of age). Those with a history of pragmatic deficits were not excluded. Also, none of the subjects met the criteria for autism at the time of evaluation or in the past. Subjects meeting the ICD-10 criteria were later rediagnosed according to the DSM-IV criteria (APA, 1994). Controls with high-functioning autism (HFA) were referred over the same index period. They met both the DSM-III-R (APA, 1987) and ICD-10 (WHO, 1993) criteria for autism and had a full-scale IQ over 70 (n = 13; 12 male; 1 female; M age:15.5 years; M full-scale IQ: 81.1). The groups differed significantly in their verbal IQ (p = .026) and full-scale IQ (p = .022) but not in their age, sex, and performance IQs. Both the groups had English as their native language and were born in the U.S.