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Evidence for Distinct Cognitive Profiles in Autism Spectrum Disorders and Specific Language Impairment

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Abstract

Findings that a subgroup of children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have linguistic capabilities that resemble specific language impairment (SLI) have led some authors to hypothesise that ASD and SLI have a shared aetiology. While considerable research has explored overlap in the language phenotypes of the two conditions, little research has examined possible overlap in cognitive characteristics. In this study, we explored nonword and sentence repetition performance, as well as performance on the Children’s Embedded Figures Test (CEFT) for children with ASD or SLI. As expected, ‘language impaired’ children with ASD (ALI) and children with SLI performed worse than both ‘language normal’ ASD (ALN) and typically developing (TD) children on the nonword and sentence repetition tests. Further, the SLI children performed worse than all other groups on the CEFT. This finding supports distinct cognitive profiles in ASD and SLI and may provide further evidence for distinct aetiological mechanisms in the two conditions.

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Notes

  1. Five of the ASD children did not meet autism spectrum cut-offs on the ADOS-G. For two of these children, the communication and social interaction total score was only one point below the ADOS-G ‘autism spectrum’ cut-off. All of these children had also previously been diagnosed with an ASD by a team that included a speech pathologist, clinical psychologist and paediatrician.

  2. CCC-2 questionnaires were returned for 15 ALN, 10 ALI and 10 SLI children. Consistent with Whitehouse et al. (2008), each of these children had GCC scores below the 10th percentile. While the return rates were not high enough to warrant extensive use of the CCC-2 results, where available, the scores confirm the composition of the ALN, ALI and SLI groups.

  3. This data analytic approach is used to control for extraneous factors such as age, gender and nonverbal ability that may potentially affect experimental performance. As the groups were selected to differ systematically on language ability and ASD traits, it is the influence of these factors that were under investigation. Therefore predictors tapping language ability or ASD traits were not introduced to the regression model.

  4. Though outcomes of the t tests that compared the observed and predicted scores were unchanged when these scores were retained.

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Acknowledgments

Lauren Taylor is supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award, and Andrew Whitehouse by a NHMRC Career Development Fellowship (#1004065). This Project was supported in part by an Apex Foundation Trust for Autism Research PhD Grant and the ARC Discovery Project Grant DP 120104713. We would like to thank all of the children and families for participating in this study. In addition, we would like to acknowledge the following schools for their assistance with recruitment and for providing space to conduct assessments: Connolly Primary School, Ocean Reef Primary School, Currambine Primary School, Heathridge Primary School, South Ballajura Primary School and The Quintilian School. Thanks also to the West Coast Language Development Centre, the Autism Association of Western Australia and Anna Hunt for their help with recruitment. We extend our appreciation to Doris Leung for developing the tasks and to Pamela See and Roxanne Smith for their help with the assessments. Many thanks also to the staff and students at The Glenleighden School for their support, and for welcoming us into their school.

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  1. Neurocognitive Development Unit, School of Psychology, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA, 6009, Australia

    Lauren J. Taylor, Murray T. Maybery & Andrew J. O. Whitehouse

  2. Telethon Institute for Child Health Research, Centre for Child Health Research, University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia

    Lauren J. Taylor & Andrew J. O. Whitehouse

  3. C.H.I.L.D. Association, The Glenleighden School, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Luke Grayndler

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Taylor, L.J., Maybery, M.T., Grayndler, L. et al. Evidence for Distinct Cognitive Profiles in Autism Spectrum Disorders and Specific Language Impairment. J Autism Dev Disord 44, 19–30 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-013-1847-2

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