Brief Report: Above and Beyond Safety: Psychosocial and Biobehavioral Impact of Autism-Assistance Dogs on Autistic Children and their Families

Autism-Assistance Dogs (AADs) are highly-skilled service animals trained primarily to ensure the safety of an autistic child by preventing elopement and mitigating ‘meltdowns’. Although anecdotal accounts and case-studies have indicated that AADs confer benefits above and beyond safety, empirical support anchored in validated clinical, behavioral, and physiological measures is lacking. To address this gap, we studied children and their families before and after receiving a well-trained AAD using a within-subject, repeated-measures design. Notably, this study is the first to assess change in a biomarker for chronic stress in both autistic children and their parents. Final analyses included pre-/post-AAD data from 11 triads (parent/handler-dog-child) demonstrating significantly positive psychosocial and biobehavioral effects of AADs.

Stimulus Control Procedure for Reducing Vocal Stereotypies in an Autistic Child

Stereotyped vocal behavior exhibited by a seven-year-old child diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and maintained by automatic reinforcement was placed under stimulus control through discrimination training. The training consisted of matching a green card (SD) with free access to vocal stereotypy and a red card (SD-absent) with interruption of stereotypy and vocal redirection. At the same time, appropriate behaviors were reinforced. After discrimination training, the child rarely engaged in vocal stereotypy in the red card condition and, to a greater extent, in the green card condition, demonstrating the ability to discriminate between the two different situations. After the training, the intervention began. Once they reached the latency criterion in the red stimulus condition, the child could have free access to vocal stereotypy (green card condition). The latency criterion for engaging in stereotypy was gradually increased during the red card condition and progressively decreased during the green card condition. The intervention follows a changing criterion design. This study indicates that stimulus discrimination training is a useful intervention to reduce vocal stereotypy in an autistic child.

Investigating the Associations Between Child Autistic Symptoms, Socioeconomic Context, and Family Life: A Pilot Study

Objective: The day-to-day experience of families with an Autistic child may be shaped by both, child characteristics and available resources, which often are influenced by the socioeconomic context of the family. Using a socioecological approach, this study explored the quantitative associations between child autistic symptoms, family socioeconomic status, and family life.Methods: Data came from the Pediatric Autism Research Cohort—PARC Study (pilot). Parents of children with a recent diagnosis of autism completed a set of assessments, including the Autism Family Experience Questionnaire, Autism Impact Measure, and a Sociodemographic Questionnaire. A series of multiple, iterative linear regression models were constructed to ascertain quantitative associations between child autistic symptoms, socioeconomic context, and family life.Results: A total of 50 children (mean age: 76 months; SD: 9.5 months; and 84% male) with data on the variables of interest were included in the analysis. The frequency of child autistic symptoms was associated with family life outcomes (p = 0.02 and R2 = 24%). Once autistic symptom frequency, symptom impact, and sociodemographic variables were considered, parents of higher educational attainment reported worse family life outcomes compared to their lesser-educated counterparts. This cumulative regression model had considerable explanatory capability (p = 0.01, R2 = 40%).Conclusion: This study demonstrates the utility of using a socioecological approach to examine the dynamic interplay between child characteristics and family circumstances. Our findings suggest that family life for parents (of an autistic child) who have obtained higher education is reported (by the parents themselves) as less satisfactory compared to that of parents without higher education, once adjusted for the autistic symptom frequency of child, symptom impact, and income. These findings can inform the design and delivery of more family-centered care pathways during the years following a diagnosis of autism.

Caregiver linguistic alignment to autistic and typically developing children

Background: Language development is a highly interactive activity. However, most research on linguistic environment has focused on quantity and complexity of linguistic input to children, with current models showing that complexity facilitates language in both TD children and autistic children.Aims: We investigate the presence and sensitivity of caregivers’ active reuse of their children’s language (linguistic alignment), and how well it predicts language development beyond other measures of linguistic input, taking also into account the child’s cognitive, social and linguistic abilities.Methods: We measure lexical, syntactic and semantic types of caregiver alignment in a longitudinal corpus involving 32 adult-autistic child and 35 adult-TD child dyads, with children between 2 and 5 years of age. We assess the extent to which caregivers repeat their children’s word, syntax and semantics, and whether this predicts language development beyond more standard predictors. Results: Caregivers tend to re-use their child’s language in a way that is related to the child’s individual, primarily linguistic differences. Caregivers’ alignment provides unique information improving our ability to predict future language development in both typical and autistic children. Conclusions: We provide evidence that language acquisition also relies on interactive conversational processes, previously understudied. We share open-source scripts to systematically extend our approach to new contexts and languages.

Considerações sobre o Desenvolvimento da Linguagem em Criança Autista / Considerations on Language Development in Autistic Child

Resumo: O autismo é um distúrbio de socialização de início precoce, cujas características aparecem desde os primeiros anos de vida da criança, afetando as áreas de interação social, de comunicação e comportamental. Assim, sabendo-se que a comunicação de crianças autistas possui peculiaridades e não segue o mesmo padrão observado em crianças normais, o presente estudo tem por objetivo discorrer acerca do desenvolvimento da linguagem em crianças autistas. Para tanto, a metodologia escolhida foi a revisão de literatura realizada em livros e artigos disponíveis em meio físico e eletrônico, cujos resultados são apresentados em forma de tópicos, onde inicialmente são traçadas algumas considerações gerais sobre o autismo e a linguagem, para ao seu final tratar da questão aquisição da linguagem pela criança autista.

“I can Speak Like You, I am Just Different” A Psycholinguistics Study of Autistic Child

Language deficiency is one of the barriers that autistic children face in their language growth. Autistic children may face these difficulties in which they have trouble in understanding and communicating their language. Using Chaer's Language Disorders Theory (2003), this research attempts to investigate the receptive language disorders performed by an autistic child named Rahesa and the expressive language disorders performed by an autistic child named Rahesa based on Suherman’s (2016) theory. Using a qualitative with descriptive approach, the data were taken from the videos of the subject’s relationship with his mother, then transcribed into dialogs and analyzed. Then, researcher continued to describe all the findings. The findings of this research indicate that an autistic person has trouble interpreting the message of others and communicating his/her emotions by verbal words. An autistic boy has three difficulties with receptive language disorder, such as difficulty in interpreting verbal language, difficulty in following verbal guidance, and difficulty in focusing his mind.As far as expressive language disorder is concerned, an autistic person faces six difficulties, such as difficulty in inserting words into sentences, difficulty in choosing the correct expression, poor comprehension, taking words out of sentences, repeating some words or phrases, and inappropriately using language structure.The present thesis seeks to offer insights to prospective scholars who are interested in linguistic, in particular psycholinguistics concerned with language problems in the case of autism. General readers will enrich their understanding of and how to cope with the forms of language problems in autistic children.

Prediction of Autism Spectrum Disorder by Facial Recognition Using Machine Learning

Autism is normally characterized as pervading disorder. The role Pervasive implies that the disorder is acute. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) individuals face difficulties in interacting with others. They also have a problem in responding to the actions, hyperactive and behavioural issues. There have been numerous technological enhancements in prediction of autism traits. This paper focusses on various machine learning methods to classify an autistic child. It mainly focusses on classification models applying VGG16 algorithm of SVM classifier, CNN and Haar Cascade using OpenCV. Using these models, better accuracy was achieved compared to other models of classification.