Grammar in Boys With Idiopathic Autism Spectrum Disorder and Boys With Fragile X Syndrome Plus Autism Spectrum Disorder

Purpose

Some boys with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and boys with fragile X syndrome and a codiagnosis of ASD (FXS+ASD) have impairments in expressive grammatical abilities. The current study compared grammatical performance in these 2 groups of school-age boys.

Method

Thirty-seven boys similar on mean length of utterance participated in the current study (FXS: n = 19, ASD: n = 18). Participants completed an ASD assessment, nonverbal IQ testing, and conversation language samples. Convergent validity of a sentence imitation task with a norm-referenced assessment of grammar was examined in addition to divergent validity of the measures with nonverbal IQ and vocabulary comprehension and production.

Results

The boys with ASD outperformed the boys with FXS+ASD on the norm-referenced assessment of “be,” and effect sizes indicate that the boys with ASD had better performance on past tense probes on the sentence imitation task and “do” on the norm-referenced assessment. The two measures of grammar had good convergent validity except for copula and auxiliary “be” and “do.” Grammatical performance was not correlated with nonverbal IQ, and trends indicate a relationship between vocabulary and grammar.

Conclusions

Despite being similar on mean length of utterance, there were group differences on grammatical performance. The sentence imitation task had good convergent validity with a norm-referenced assessment of grammar for the third-person singular and past tense probes and therefore could be an inexpensive and valid tool to use clinically for these populations. Future research should continue to refine this task, particularly for the probes with high rates of unscorable responses (i.e., “be” and “do”).

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