Autism Research Methods

Early identification of speech, language or communication delay is important for a child or young persons’ well-being. All practitioners have a responsibility to identify children’s needs and intervene with appropriate support as early as possible, to help children achieve the goals of ‘Every Child Matters’ and progress towards the Early Learning Goals. The importance of early language and communication skills for children’s later achievements is now well documented and the need to provide support for children at this early stage is so that they can achieve their full potential. This means recognising a child’s difficulty quickly:

Language Development - At this age children should be able to give pertinent information such as name, age, sex, parent name (at least first) and be learning address and phone

*Language development: A child will be able to put words together into a sentence, will start asking questions, can participate in sing-alongs, and uses several hundred words.

Based on the assessments, the Developmental Assessment of Young Children (DAYC-2) and the Assessment of Basic Language and Learning Skills Revised (ABLLS-R), administered by the ASIP team in August 2015, Robert’s results reveal deficits within all developmental domains (i.e. Cognition, Communication, Social-Emotional, Physical Development and Adaptive Behavior). Furthermore, the DAYC-2 revealed that Robert functioned at the age of 9-21 months on all developmental domains. The ABLLS-R’s results revealed

The Welsh Government has categorised the different stages of language development that an EAL child can be assessed at.

Formal standardized tests or screens that are used for children whose mother tongue is not English are often not very helpful for the following reasons

The level of a child’s communication skills can have an effect on most areas of development. If a child is struggling with communication and language they

Specific language disorders, or SLI, affect approximately 7-8% of children in kindergarten. SLI are diagnosed in children, mostly, age 3 and older. The relatively late diagnosis is done to distinguish the children that have SLI from those who are simply “late talkers”. Some of the characteristics of SLI involve problem in only one area and some with problems in all areas of language. The children who are diagnosed with SLI may have a delayed vocabulary growth, disinterest in engagement in social interactions relevant to their age, difficulty in comprehension and/or production in any of the following: morphology, semantics, phonology, syntax, and pragmatics. For example, a 4.8 year old child that does not engage in social interactions

There may be a recognised syndrome or disorder that causes language difficulty for the child and is not able to communicate with others. The child may have a lack of stimulation and support to provide the rich language experience necessary to develop speech, language and communication skills. For example at school, the setting may not have an enabling environment to stimulate the child’s different interests necessary for acquiring language. The books, music, songs and so on may not stimulate and interest the child.

Speech, language and communication difficulties can have a profound and lasting effect on children’s lives and development. These can affect their ability to communicate and interact with others. The impact of these difficulties will vary depending on the severity of the problems, the support they receive, the demands of the child’s environment

Some strengths of this achievement assessment include that not every subtest will be administered depending on the age of the student and the variety of areas that this assessment measures. This assessment measures oral expression and listening comprehension that could help a child qualify for special education services. The math subtests provide valuable data that can be used for objectives for the child’s Individualized Education Program (IEP). Also, the results from this achievement test can be used to determine if a child has a Specific Learning Disability and in which areas he or she would qualify in for services. A weakness of this test is that the administrator must know the scoring procedures for each subtest. With the Pseudoword decoding subtest, the child is timed and the administrator will record the student’s responses exactly using correct punctuation or phonetic symbols and this can lead to inaccuracies in scoring. The WIAT-III has multiple areas to be tested to give us an accurate reading of the child’s

It demonstrations that I can interpret the data and validity of assessments results and communicate those results to partners and families in language they understand. Ages & Stages is a screen to determine if the child is has any delays in five developmental areas: communication, gross motor, fine motor, problem solving and personal-social and determine if future screening are recommended. The toddler was screen over a 2 day period with mother present the screening data suggested, giving his age should be referred to First Steps for further assessments in language, gross motor skills and cognitive

Should the language competence of children from low-SES backgrounds be considered deficient or different? Evaluate the evidence for and against each claim.

The methodology of the study is as follows: the participants were thirty-four French children, (16 girls, 18 boys) between seventeen and forty-two months old. They were French monolingual and had no serious health problems or impediments to language acquisition, such as speech or hearing. The DLPF measure was used, designed specifically for French. The procedure consisted on indirect data-taking, as parents completed a questionnaire once a month from seventeen to thirty-five months, and twice a month from thirty-six to forty-two. This resulted in twenty-three measures per child although most were missing values, the average of which was 6 (26%). Five had no missing values, and two had only one. The author corrected for this missing data by replacing the missing value with the preceding measurement. The results were collated into a graph, with the variables of: nouns, verbs, adjectives, grammatical forms and total vocabulary (the sum of all variables). A group curve composed of the average of all the children's

Woodcock Johnson Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities Revised. It has good high level tasks for specific drill down areas and strong norms including pediatrics /grade level equivalents but is not normed for ABI or other disease categories.