title: Brief report: a scale for rating conversational impairment in autism spectrum disorder.
abstract: There are few well-standardized measures of conversational breakdown in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). The study's objective was to develop a scale for measuring pragmatic impairments in conversations of individuals with ASD. We analyzed 46 semi-structured conversations of children and adolescents with high-functioning ASD using a functional linguistic paradigm. Five constructs were developed that assessed difficulties related to the pragmatics of conversation: atypical intonation; semantic drift; terseness; pedantic speech; perseveration. The scale shows good inter-rater reliability and variation in the scales is not simply a reflection of IQ or language competence. This tool represents a way of characterizing language use in ASD and is an initial step towards developing a tool to evaluate change in degree of social impairments in conversation.
authors.affiliation: Department of English, University of British Columbia, V8N 1Z4, Voncouver, BC, Canada.
authors.forename: Jessica
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: de Villiers
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Fine
authors.forename: Gary
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Ginsberg
authors.forename: Liezanne
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Vaccarella
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Szatmari
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D001321:Autistic Disorder / Q000453:epidemiology*; D002648:Child; D003147:Communication Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000453:epidemiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007807:Language Tests; D008297:Male; D015588:Observer Variation; D011594:Psychometrics; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires