Understanding differences in social-emotional behavior can help identify atypical development. This study examined the differences in social-emotional development in children at increased risk of an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis (infant siblings of children diagnosed with the disorder). Parents completed the Brief Infant-Toddler Social-Emotional Assessment (BITSEA) to determine its ability to flag children with later-diagnosed ASD in a high-risk (HR) sibling population. Parents of HR (n = 311) and low-risk (LR; no family history of ASD; n = 127) children completed the BITSEA when their children were 18 months old and all children underwent a diagnostic assessment for ASD at age 3 years. All six subscales of the BITSEA (Problems, Competence, ASD Problems, ASD Competence, Total ASD Score, and Red Flags) distinguished between those in the HR group who were diagnosed with ASD (n = 84) compared to non-ASD-diagnosed children (both HR-N and LR). One subscale (BITSEA Competence) differentiated between the HR children not diagnosed with ASD and the LR group. The results suggest that tracking early social-emotional development may have implications for all HR children, as they are at increased risk of ASD but also other developmental or mental health conditions.

The co-occurring development of internalizing and externalizing problems were examined in an inception cohort of 392 children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at age 3 who were assessed on four occasions. Results indicated that internalizing and externalizing problems were stable over time and highly comorbid. Joint trajectory analysis suggested that 13% of the sample followed a dual high-risk trajectory. High risk was not found to be associated with intellectual ability or autism spectrum disorder symptom severity but was linked to lower income and gender: more girls than boys were found in the high/stable internalizing problems trajectory. The results suggest that 1 in 4 preschoolers followed a trajectory of internalizing or externalizing problems (or a combination of the two) that could be characterized as clinically elevated.

This experiment examined the vowel responses of severely disabled readers and normal control children in reading orthographically regular nonwords. The disabled readers were divided into three groups based on their relative Verbal and Performance IQs. Following the rationale of Fowler, Shankweiler, and Liberman (1979), vowel responses were classified as incorrect or correct. Correctness was determined according to either context-free or context-dependent criteria. The main finding was that the vowel responses of two out of three reading disabled groups paralleled those of their reading level peers. However, disabled readers with higher Performance than Verbal IQs made significantly more context-free responses and significantly fewer context-dependent responses than all other groups. Moreover, knowledge of how speech is segmented at the phonemic level predicted performance on the reading task. The findings suggest that disabled readers employ very local (context-independent) strategies in reading; these findings are discussed in terms of the idea that disabled readers suffer a basic deficit in phonological processing (Liberman, Liberman, & Mattingly, 1980) or linguistic processing (Siegel & Ryan, 1984).

The present research was designed to systematically examine consonant errors made by severely disabled readers in an attempt to clarify the nature of their underlying disability. In our first study, three groups of disabled readers were compared to both age- and reading-level matched controls on their performance reading a list of 96 one-syllable nonsense words. As predicted, subjects in all five groups made many more phonetic feature substitutions than orientation reversal substitutions. This is consistent with previous work indicating that reading errors typically result from linguistic- rather than visual-processing difficulties. Further, subjects from all three reading disabled groups, but not from the control groups, made more consonant addition errors than any other error type. A qualitative, post-hoc analysis of the errors suggested that these additions were quite systematic for the reading disabled subjects. The second study was designed as a replication and extension of the first. Results were consistent with those obtained in Study 1. These results are discussed with reference to the possible underlying cause(s) of severe reading disability.

Objective: To determine the risk of the lesser variant (or PDD-like traits) in the biological and nonbiological second- and third-degree relatives of PDD probands using a screening questionnaire and to investigate the extent to which the risk of the lesser variant differs according to various characteristics of the proband. Method: The sample consists of a series of 34 nuclear families with 2 affected PDD children (multiplex, MPX), 44 families with a single PDD child (simplex, SPX), and 14 families who adopted a PDD child. Data on characteristics of the lesser variant in 1362 biological and 337 nonbiological second- and third-degree relatives were collected from parents by telephone interview and from several maternal and paternal relatives by questionnaire. Results: All components of the lesser variant were more common in biological relatives (BR) than nonbiological relatives (NBR), confirming the familial aggregation of the traits. Proband characteristics associated with an increased risk of the lesser variant in relatives were a higher level of functioning and coming from a MPX family. Conclusions: These findings on the familial aggregation of the lesser variant suggest that the genes for PDD also confer susceptibility to the lesser variant and that PDD may be a genetically heterogeneous disorder.