The self-presentational behaviour of 43 6- to 12-year-old children with high functioning autism spectrum disorders (HFASD) and normal intelligence and 43 matched comparisons was investigated. Children were prompted to describe themselves twice, first in a baseline condition and then in a condition where they were asked to convince others to select them for a desirable activity (self-promotion)....

People appropriately adjust the distance between themselves and others during social interaction, and they may feel discomfort and move away when another person intrudes on their personal space. In the present study, we investigated personal space in children with persistent difficulties in the domain of social behavior, such as children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and in children wit...

Many individuals with autism cannot speak or cannot speak intelligibly. A variety of aided augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) approaches have been investigated. Most of the research on these approaches has been single-case research, with small numbers of participants. The purpose of this investigation was to meta-analyze the single case research on the use of aided AAC with indivi...

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Parents of children with autism frequently report that their children exhibit unusual responses to sensory experiences. Little research is available, however, describing how parents' and children's culture and environment might influence parents' reports of their children's behaviors. This study compared the frequency of parent-reported responses to sensory experiences in children from two coun...

The aim of this critical review is to examine the effectiveness of using robot-assisted therapy to improve social interaction skills in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). All literature search was completed and yielded the following study designs: two single group (post) tests, one single group (pre-post) test, one between-groups study, one case study and one longitudinal study. Ove...

This study examined the relationship between core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder, parental romantic expectations, and parental provision of sexuality and relationship education in an online sample of 190 parents of youth 12-18 years of age with a parent-reported diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. Regression analyses were conducted separately for youth with autism spectrum disorder + p...

In the current study, storytelling and story retelling by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were analyzed to explore ambiguous third-person pronoun use in narratives. Twenty-three children diagnosed with ASD aged 6;1 to 14;3 and 17 typically-developing (TD) children aged 5;11 to 14;4 participated in the study. In the retelling task, no significant difference between the groups was fo...

Eye-tracking studies in young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have shown a visual attention preference for geometric patterns when viewing paired dynamic social images (DSIs) and dynamic geometric images (DGIs). In the present study, eye-tracking of two different paired presentations of DSIs and DGIs was monitored in a group of 13 children aged 4 to 6 years with ASD and 20 chronolo...