title: Variables relating to the mental development of children with infantile autism.
abstract: Among 54 variables studied in 194 autistic children, nine variables--meaningful words, pointing, eating without assistance, crane symptoms (maneuvers of letting a person manipulate an object by grasping his or her hand and bringing it close to the object), echolalia, changing clothes without assistance, speech loss (loss of once-emerged meaningful words before 30 months of age), establishment of toilet-training and diagnosis of MBD--were correlated significantly to the children's mental development levels with absolute values of Kendall's tau b over 0.2. A discriminant analysis showed that three positive correlates, i.e., meaningful words, pointing and echolalia, and a negative correlate, i.e., crane symptoms, were important in distinguishing between young autistics with and without unfavorable mental development and possible poor outcomes.
mesh_terms: D001321:Autistic Disorder / Q000150:complications* / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000523:psychology; D002648:Child; D002658:Developmental Disabilities / Q000150:complications* / Q000175:diagnosis; D003937:Diagnosis, Differential; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male