Practice parameter: screening and diagnosis of autism: report of the Quality Standards Subcommittee of the American Academy of Neurology and the Child Neurology Society.

Autism is a common disorder of childhood, affecting 1 in 500 children. Yet, it often remains unrecognized and undiagnosed until or after late preschool age because appropriate tools for routine developmental screening and screening specifically for autism have not been available. Early identification of children with autism and intensive, early intervention during the toddler and preschool years improves outcome for most young children with autism.

The screening and diagnosis of autistic spectrum disorders.

The Child Neurology Society and American Academy of Neurology recently proposed to formulate Practice Parameters for the Diagnosis and Evaluation of Autism for their memberships. This endeavor was expanded to include representatives from nine professional organizations and four parent organizations, with liaisons from the National Institutes of Health. This document was written by this multidisciplinary Consensus Panel after systematic analysis of over 2,500 relevant scientific articles in the literature.

Understanding the continuum of discrete-trial traditional behavioral to social-pragmatic developmental approaches in communication enhancement for young children with autism/PDD.

Clinicians are faced with the challenge of making informed decisions amidst heated debates over the most effective treatment approaches for young children with autism. This article provides a more specific focus to this debate by considering the practice of enhancing spontaneous language and related social-communicative abilities of young children with autism/pervasive developmental disorder (PPD). First, a historical perspective of the evolution of different approaches for enhancing communication and related abilities is presented, followed by a description of characteristics of the approaches.

Brothers and sisters of young children with communication disorders.

Family-centered approaches have revolutionized the way that clinicians provide services to young children with communication disorders and their families. With greater recognition of the significant impact that siblings have on each other's development and the potential stress and role confusion that siblings may experience when there is childhood disability in the family, it becomes more critical that the needs of siblings are considered and addressed. In this article, a variety of issues are considered relative to siblings' experiences.

The emergence of repair strategies in infants and toddlers.

This article describes the emergence of repair behaviors in young children as a reflection of three significant developmental achievements: the emergence of communicative intentionality, the development of socioemotional perspective taking, and the acquisition of effective communicative means. Because research in the emergence of preverbal communicative repairs is limited, a cross-sectional study was conducted on the ontogeny of repair strategies using the normative samples from the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales (Wetherby & Prizant, 1993). Patterns of early repair behaviors of typically developing children, as well as those of small groups of children with hearing impairments and pervasive developmental disorders, are presented.

Communication disorders and emotional/behavioral disorders in children and adolescents.

Recent research in child psychiatry has demonstrated a high prevalence of speech, language, and communication disorders in children referred to psychiatric and mental health settings for emotional and behavioral problems. Conversely, children referred to speech and language clinics for communication disorders have been found to have a high rate of diagnosable psychiatric disorders. Most of the emerging knowledge regarding relationships between communication disorders and psychiatric disorders has been presented in the child psychiatric literature.

Encoding of new versus old information by autistic children.

Research and literature on communication problems of autistic individuals have identified specific pragmatic deficiencies. This preliminary study focused upon describing autistic children's verbal performance in regard to the pragmatic ability of encoding new versus old information. Four autistic children with MLUs of 1.

Analysis of functions of delayed echolalia in autistic children.

This study was a preliminary attempt to determine how autistic children used delayed echolalia in naturalistic interactions with familiar people. Fourteen functional categories of delayed echolalia were derived based on videotape analyses of linguistic, extralinguistic, and paralinguistic features. Individual differences in functional usage were apparent across the three subjects.

Language acquisition and communicative behavior in autism: toward an understanding of the "whole" of it.

Deviant language characteristics, deficits in social interaction, and ritualistic and compulsive behaviors are now considered to be among the definitive characteristics of the autistic syndrome. There have been few attempts to bring a sense of cohesion to the varied communicative symptomatology evident in autism, because much of the research literature has been product oriented rather than process oriented, and has focused on language structure rather than function. Therefore, behaviors such as immediate echolalia, delayed echolalia, and interactive rituals are often viewed as isolated, deviant phenomena, rather than as phenomena related to predominant cognitive processing modes and cognitive-linguistic development in autism.

The functions of immediate echolalia in autistic children.

This research was intended to discover how immediate echolalia functioned for autistic children in interactions with familial adults. For echolalic children were videotaped at school and at home, in both group and dyadic interactions in natural situations such as lunchtime, family activities, and play activities in school. After conducting a multilevel analysis (of over 1,000 utterances) of verbal and nonverbal factors, response latency, and intonation, it was discovered that immediate echolalia is far more than a meaningless behavior, as has been previously reported.