Failure to use expressive language is a defining characteristic of juvenile autism (Ricks & Wing, 1975). Indeed, the fact that some 90~ of autistic children end up in institutions seems directly caused by two languagerelated problems--the child's inability to communicate with others, and the child's failure to learn to use "self-talk" as a means of establishing selfcontrol over his thoughts and...

ReActivities© are digital play sequences which encourage the integration of social, emotional and cognitive development in children on the autistic spectrum. Funding from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), Learning Programme, has enabled a collaborative approach to the development of the ReActivities© software. As a result of working directly with children on t...

Antenatal training through music and maternal talk to the unborn fetus is a topic of general interest for parents-to-be in China, but we still lack a comprehensive assessment of their effects on the development of autistic-like behaviors during early childhood. During 2014-2016, 34,749 parents of children around the age of 3 years who were enrolled at kindergarten in the Longhua district of She...

BACKGROUND Autism is a disorder of early childhood characterized by social impairment, communication abnormalities and stereotyped behaviors. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis deserves special attention, since it is the basis for emotions and social interactions that are affected in autism. AIM To assess basal and stimulated plasma cortisol, and adrenocorticotropic hormone ...

Children with autism are said to be poor mind readers: They have a limited understanding of the role that mental states play in determining emotions and behavior. In this research, 23 high-functioning children from the autistic spectrum (M age 9 years 3 months), 42 6-year-old controls, and 43 10-year-old controls were presented with six emotion-evoking stories and they were asked to explain pro...

objective: autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by difficulty in verbal and non-verbal communication, impaired social interaction, and restricted and repetitive behavior. it has been recently introduced as a multigenic disorder with significant epigenetic effects on its pathology. recently, epigenetic silencing of retinoic acid receptorrelated orphan receptor alpha (rorα) gene ...

BACKGROUND Spoken and gestural communication proficiency varies greatly among autistic individuals. Three studies examined the role of oral- and manual-motor skill in predicting autistic children's speech development. METHODS Study 1 investigated whether infant and toddler oral- and manual-motor skills predict middle childhood and teenage speech fluency; Study 2 verified those early infant an...

Although traditionally regarded as separate disorders, children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with Asperger syndrome (AS) may to some extent present with similar problems. The aims of the present study were to investigate if children diagnosed with SLI and children diagnosed with AS can be differentiated from each other based on parental evaluations of language and autist...

Abstract Objectives We evaluated a systematic instructional package for teaching four-step SGD-based requesting and social communication sequence. Of interest was whether intervention would lead to accurate performance of the sequence, as well generalization, maintenance, discriminated/functional use. Methods Five minimally verbal autistic children received instruction complete sequence on an i...

Autoimmunity to the central nervous system (CNS), especially to myelin basic protein (MBP), may play a causal role in autism, a neurodevelopmental disorder. Because many autistic children harbor elevated levels of measles antibodies, we conducted a serological study of measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) and MBP autoantibodies. Using serum samples of 125 autistic children and 92 control children, antib...