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It has been well documented that poverty places children and youth at risk for a variety of negative socio-emotional and cognitive outcomes (McLoyd, 1998; Duncan, Brooks-Gunn & Klebanov, 1994). Furthermore, research has indicated that poverty experienced in early childhood, especially extreme poverty, is more detrimental to children's future life chances than poverty experienced later in life (Brooks-Gunn & Duncan, 1997). While poverty itself has been linked to negative outcomes, it certainly does not occur in isolation. A considerable amount of research has described the co-occurrence of poverty and multiple ecological risk factors such as teen and single parenthood, negative life events, marital distress, family dysfunction, and parent psychopathology, all of which have been associated with negative outcomes for children and youth (Rutter, 1980; Sameroff et al., 1998; Sameroff, 1983). What is less well understood is the specific impact of poverty and its associated risk factors on the healthy development of very young children (Halpern, 1993; Aber, Jones & Cohen, in press), in particular on children under age three. A detailed picture of the impact of poverty and ecological risks on young children's social and emotional development is crucial to understanding the entire context of children's entry into Head Start and , in particular, into Early Head Start. This picture can serve Head Start practitioners and program developers as they address the many needs of poor young children and help them successfully transition to an early learning and social environment.This poster will address these issues using data collected as part of an epidemiological study of infant and toddler social and emotional development. Using both cumulative and interactive risk models proposed by Rutter (1980) and Sameroff (1983), the following questions will be addressed: (1) What are the individual contributions of risks, in particular neighborhood and family poverty and their co-factors, to infant/toddler externalizing, internalizing, and maladaptive problems, dysregulation, and competencies? (2) What are the combined effects of poverty and its co-factors on such outcomes? In particular, what are the unique contributions of risk operationalized as a cumulative index versus risk operationalized as a series of interactions?Data for this poster come from a large-scale epidemiological study of infant and toddler social and emotional development. 1279 parents of 1- and 2-year old children, originally identified from birth records obtained from the Connecticut Department of Public Health, completed the Infant-Toddler Social Emotional Assessment (ITSEA), a new adult-report measure of 12-36-month old social emotional problems and competencies, as well multiple measures of parenting, parental psychopathology, life events, marital distress, etc. Families were ethnically diverse and reported multiple ecological risks (e.g., 26% had a high school degree or fewer years of education, and 29% were receiving at least one form of public assistance).Preliminary results indicate that scores on the ITSEA problem domain (composed of internalizing, externalizing, maladaptive problems, and dysregulation) were significantly correlated with a variety of parental and family risk factors. For example, high parent depressive and anxiety symptoms, high negative life events, and the use of a lax or over-reactive parenting style were positively correlated with social emotional problems (r.36, r.19, and r.39, respectively). In addition, a cumulative risk variable was constructed that was positive when 3 or more socioeconomic indicators (public assistance, single parenthood, or poster A common lag in development in young children is slow or reduced expressive language production. A few studies have suggested that toddlers who show lags in expressive language engage in social interactions and behaviors that are less positive than those children whose communicative skills are progressing normally. The current work provides a first look at the social and emotional competencies and problem behaviors of toddlers with lags in expressive language development without concomitant lags in receptive language. The Infant-Toddler Social & Emotional Assessment (ITSEA), a new parent-report questionnaire designed to assess social-emotional problems and competencies in infants and toddlers was employed to measure social-emotional adjustment. Based on data from a representative birth cohort sample (N 1279), 17% of 12- to 36- month olds fell in the lowest 10th percentile on vocabulary production relative to reported age norms on the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories Short Form. Children with low vocabulary levels were reported by parents to exhibit more externalizing symptoms (t3.1, p<.01), depression/withdrawal (t 3.5, p<.01), and lower competence (t7.2, p<.01) on the ITSEA. This report focuses on a subset of children drawn from the birth cohort sample who were directly assessed in the home with the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL). Of 180 assessments, fourteen 2-year-olds from English-speaking monolingual homes participated in this study; seven identified as 'late-talkers' based on a profile of performance on the MSEL and seven controls matched on age, sex, ethnicity, maternal education, and rate of receiving public assistance.Toddlers who exhibited typical development in nonverbal intelligence and receptive language with a marked lag in expressive language skills on the MSEL were identified as late-talkers. To insure that the toddlers identified as late-talkers exhibited delays in expressive language only, a minimal difference between receptive and expressive language standard scores on the MSEL of one standard deviation was required for inclusion in the late-talking group. The late-talking and control groups' nonverbal intelligence and receptive language standard scores on the MSEL were comparable. The groups differed only on expressive language performance, which was at least one standard deviation below the mean based on the MSEL expressive language standard score for the late talking group (late talkers: mean34.7, SD 6.6 and controls: mean58.9, SD5.8, t 52.5, p<.0001).Late-talking toddlers were rated by parents on the ITSEA as exhibiting greater negative emotional reactivity, reduced compliance and less empathic behaviors than controls with normative expressive language development (t 2.1 to 2.2, p <.05). These findings reflect the first evidence that toddlers with specific expressive language lags are less competent than peers with typical language development. Reduced competencies in the form of compliance and empathy may be a factor in prior parent reports that late-talking toddlers are more difficult to manage and are less skilled emotionally.
poster Past history reveals a reluctance on the part of parents and some professionals to identify and label infants and toddlers who have invisible handicaps such as autism. Times have changed. Many parents are more familiar with the early childhood developmental sequences. They are more likely to consult with professionals when their child is not developing in the same way as other children and to request services. Research in early brain development points to the early years as a critical window of opportunity. Education laws, in the United States, now provide children (birth to 21) at risk for or with disabilities with entitlements to services. The process of identifying and evaluating infants and toddlers with suspected developmental disabilities is complicated. Parents are understandably frightened and anxious. There is usually no simple procedure (i.e., blood test or x-ray) that determines diagnosis. Both research and experience have demonstrated that these evaluations are best done over an extended period of time and based on observations by those who know the child best. A collaborative process which culls information from parents about the child at home and in the community and from professionals (educators, physicians and clinicians) is more likely to produce an accurateand comprehensive profile of the child's current level of functioning. The point at which the presence of a disability is suspected creates an opportunity to engage parents in the evaluation process. Multi-source and site data also increases the reliability of the information which can sometimes be compromised by the limitations of test instruments and time. This poster session will focus on The Five P's (Parent/Professional Preschool Performance Profile) System which involves parents and professionals in the shared assessment of 458 behavior items in the major domains of development: Classroom Adjustment; Self Help Skills; and Language, Social, Motor and Cognitive Development. Both developmental milestones and interfering behaviors are included. The Five P's is a reliable and valid assessment instrument. There are norm tables, based on data collected on over 450 typically developing children. Index and percentile scores can be calculated. The Five P's System provides clinicians with reliable information from parents and teachers which assists in the necessary but time consuming task of data collection. It gives parents much needed direction at a time of emotional turmoil. The reports generate a comprehensive profile of the child's needs and strengths which assists with the formulation of a diagnosis. The process leads to the establishment of goals and the development of remediations with realistic expectations for the child. The founder and director who developed The Five P's will discuss the implementation and dynamic use of the instrument. The university-based researcher who designed the reliability, validity and normalization studies for The Five P's will review these statistical studies.
poster Recent investigations of the narrative practices of individuals with autismhave highlighted the role of social-cognition and affective knowledge infacilitating narrative interactions. Evidence suggests that amongindividuals with autism who range in mental age between 7 and 11 years,narrative competence is tied to performance on theory of mind tasks (Cappset al., in press; Tager-Flusberg, 1995; Tager-Flusberg & Sullivan, 1995).However, among somewhat older children (mean mental age 12), narrativeabilities are most strongly related to measures of affective knowledge(Losh & Capps, submitted). Thus, prior research suggests that theunderpinnings of narrative abilities may shift over the course ofdevelopment. In order to delineate this dynamic, however, information isneeded concerning the emergence of these skills in very young,high-functioning children with autism.Fifteen high-functioning children with autism and 15 typically developingcomparison children participated in this study. Children ranged in agefrom 4 to 8 years and were matched on language ability using the PeabodyPicture Vocabulary Test, Revised (Dunn & Dunn, 1981). Narratives wereelicited using the wordless picturebook, Frog, where are you? (Mayer, 1969)and narrative ability was assessed by coding the inclusion of the story'smain events and the establishment and maintenance of the stories theme.In addition, the Smarties task (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985) and theinteractive version of the Sally-Anne task (Wimmer & Perner, 1983) wereadministered to assess first-order theory of mind. Emotionalunderstanding was measured using Delehanty and Reilly's Affective JudgementQuestionnaire for Children (AJQ; 1993), which involves labeling andreproducing facial expressions of basic emotions (happy, sad, angry,afraid, and surprised), and, through a series of illustrated vignettes,inferring characters' emotional states and providing a rationale for theseinferences.Not surprisingly, given their social-communicative deficits, resultssuggest that children with autism performed less well than comparisonchildren with respect to indices of narrative ability, theory of mind, andaffective judgement. Furthermore, among children with autism, performanceon false belief tasks was significantly correlated with the establishmentand maintenance of the story's 'search' theme, r .811, p < .01, and itsrelationship with the number of story components included approachedsignificance (r .583, p <.1). While performance on the affectiveknowledge task was significantly related to performance on false belieftasks (r .843, p < .05), it did not relate to either index of narrativecompetence. Taken together, these results underscore the role of theory ofmind abilities in the development of narrative skill and affectiveknowledge in young children with autism and point to the need for ongoingattempts to discern the changing relationships between social-cognitive,affective, and narrative abilities over the course of development withintypical and atypical populations alike.
poster Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder involving significantimpairments in language, communication, and social functioning. Studies oflanguage development in autism have highlighted the centrality of pragmaticdeficits to the communicative impairment that individuals with autismsuffer, and have noted delays in morphosyntactic development as well(Tager-Flusberg, Calkins, Nolin, Baumberger, Anderson, & Chadwick-Dias,1990). Little research, however, has focused on the relationship betweenpragmatic and morphosyntactic abilities. This study endeavored to do sothrough the analysis of children's production of tag questions. Tagquestions are appended to the end of declarative statements (e.g., you'rehappy, aren't you?) and are used frequently in everyday interactions formultiple discursive purposes, including clarification of intent andexpression of positive feedback and empathy (e.g., Harres, 1998; Lloyd &Goodwin, 1993). Tag question formation draws not only on pragmaticknowledge, but also relies on complex morphosyntactic abilities (e.g.,question formation, negation, verb auxiliaries, pronominalizations, wordorder, polarity, and subject marking). As such, the study of tag questionsin autism offers the unique opportunity to examine the relationship betweenthe pragmatic and morphosyntactic impairments observed in autism. Participants included 20 high-functioning children with autism and20 normally developing children. Children ranged in age from 3 to 12 yearsand were matched on language age as measured by the PPVT-R (Dun & Dunn,1981). Children completed the Tag Question Task (Dennis, Sugar, &Whitaker, 1982), in which they were presented with various statements andasked to formulate them as tag questions. For the purpose of comparingchildren's morphosyntactic abilities during production of tag questionswith that produced in a straightforward imitation task and in anunstructured context, children also completed the Carrow Elicited LanguageInventory (CELI; Carrow, 1974) and a 10 minute semi-structuredconversational interaction with an experimenter. All measures were codedfor the frequency of morphosyntactic errors. To control for varyinglengths of tasks, the number of errors in each task were divided by thenumber of clauses to create a proportion of errors for each task. Becausegroups were matched on language ability, group differences were notexpected in the repetition task (CELI) or in the conversationalinteraction. Further, while both groups were expected to exhibit greaterdifficulty with the Tag Question Task than with the other two, given thecomplex pragmatic and morphosyntactic knowledge this measure requires, itwas also hypothesized that children with autism would commit significantlymore errors than controls in this context. Consistent with hypotheses, results indicated that tag questionsposed the most difficulty, in that both groups committed proportionallymore errors in this context. In addition, although children in theautistic group did not differ from controls in the proportion of errorscommitted in the repetition or conversation tasks, they committedsignificantly more morphosyntactic errors than controls when producing tagquestions. These findings suggest an interaction of pragmatic andmorphosyntactic impairments in autism and demonstrate the complexrelationship between pragmatic and morphosyntactic development in typicaland atypical populations alike.
poster For many years, researchers have been interested in when and howchildren are able to explain actions and events in their environment.Generating explanations involves understanding objects and events inrelation to their underlying causal properties. Children's ability togenerate explanations is central to a specific theory of cognitivedevelopment known as the 'theory theory,' which posits that children\sunderstanding of the world is akin to scientific theories (Gopnik &Meltzoff, 1997). The 'theory theory' suggests that children have severaltheories about the world, each in a different domain, which are elaboratedand revised as new information about each of these domains is acquired.Wellman (Schult & Wellman, 1997; Wellman, Hickling & Schult, 1998) hasposited that children develop at least three explanatory systems in atheory-like manner: for psychological events, one for physical events, andone for biological events. Over a set of experiments, they have shown thatchildren as young as three-years-old are able to provide explanations forevents in all three of these domains. Such research is relevant to conceptualizations of the nature ofthe autistic impairment. Several researchers (Meltzoff & Gopnik, 1993;Gopnik, Capps & Meltzoff, in press) have suggested 'theory theory' mayprovide a good explanation for the difficulties that children with autismsuffer. In particular, children with autism may have a limited ability orinclination to form theories about the world. One way this would manifestis in a difficulty providing the kinds of domain specific explanationsthat characterize the cognition of typically developing peers. To consider this question, in the present study 15 highfunctioning children with autism, ranging in age from three- toseven-years-old, and 15 comparison children matched on language ability asindicated by the PPVT-revised (Dunn & Dunn, 1981) were presented with aset of stories similar to those used by Schult and Wellman (1997,Experiment 2). The stories involved characters performing either actionsthat were possible (i.e., drawing with a crayon instead of painting) oractions that were impossible, either for biological (i.e., staying awakeforever) or for physical reasons (i.e., jumping in the air and floatingthere). After hearing the story, children were asked if the charactercarry out the proposed action and to justify their responses. Across groups, the majority of children identified possibleactions as such and children correctly attributed their responses to thecharacter's voluntary physical action. However, target children were morelikely to deem impossible events possible (40%) than were control children(11%). In considering the physically impossible events, the pattern ofjustifications given by the children with autism were similar to thosegiven by controls. Thus, although they were more likely to state thatphysically impossible events were possible, they explained theirappraisals by referring to physical processes. For the biologicallyimpossible events, however, in addition to being less adept at recognizingbiologically impossible events, children with autism were less likely thancomparison children to justify their responses by appealing to biologicalprinciples. These data support the hypothesis that the explanatory abilitiesof children with autism are limited in general and that such limitationsmight be related to a more general difficulty forming theories about theworld. Further, these findings extend evidence that children withautism\s understanding of physical processes might be relatively spared,compared to their understanding of psychological and biological processes.(e.g., Leslie & Thaiss, 1992).
poster Comparing sensorimotor development in children with mental retardation andwith autism allows to separate the effects of the autistic disturbance fromthe effects of the cognitive disturbance. The available show that thesensorimotor development of children with mental is similar to that oftypically developing children whereas children with autism show an atypicalprofile.The goal of the present study is (1) to evaluate sensorimotor developmentin children with autism as compared with mentally retarded children; (2) toverify whether thi development is homogeneous or not in the two clinicalgroups examined. 09A409A409A409A409 09 09 09A409A409A409 09Twenty-three children with autism and 23 retarded children withdevelopmental delay mached for CA and MA, were evaluated with theUzgiris-Hunt Scales. Results show that children with autism have higherperformance in Object permanence, Mean-end relations and Spatial relationscompared with children with mental retardation. Children with mentalretardation present a substantially homogenous sensorimotor developmentalprofile with the different domains strongly interdependent. On thecontrary, children with autism present an uneven development with lessinterdependence between domains.
The social-emotional development of late-talking toddlers
Julia R. Irwin, Alice S. Carter, Margaret Briggs-Gowan
Evaluating the child (2-5) with a developmental disability
Judith Bloch, John Hicks
Narrative development in young, non-retarded children with autism: affective and social-cognitive underpinnings
Molly C. Losh, Lisa M. Capps
Morphosyntactic and pragmatic abilities in autism: an analysis of tag question production
Molly C. Losh, Lisa M. Capps, Judy S. Reilly
Understanding the development of explanations in young children with autism
David M. Sobel, Molly C. Losh, Lisa M. Capps, Alison Gopnik
Sensorimotor development in children with autism and with mental retardation
Paola Bernabei, Paola Perucchini, Alessandra Corcelli, Luigia Camaioni, Gabriel Levi