Brief report: a scale for rating conversational impairment in autism spectrum disorder.
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.
de Villiers
Jessica
J
Department of English, University of British Columbia, V8N 1Z4, Voncouver, BC, Canada.
Fine
Jonathan
J
Ginsberg
Gary
G
Vaccarella
Liezanne
L
Szatmari
Peter
P
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