If you aren't someone who is directly associated with someone with autism it is important to be educated and know that while some children make great strides in progression and are extremely high functioning, there is still not a cure for autism (CDC, 2014). Below are a few studies done comparing children with autism spectrum disorder to typically developing children. .
In the first study fourteen adolescents with a prior diagnosis of autism were examined to see if language deficits still existed. This study places focus on adolescents with optimal outcome. It was conducted for several reasons: there has been minimal research done with this population, to minimize the diversity of children with autism who are functioning academically within the normal range, and to see whether these adolescents' vocabularies mature as they did (Kelley, Paul, Fein, & Naigles, 2006). The hypothesis suggested in this study is that children with a history of autism are distinguishable from typically developing peers. .
A total of 28 participants were included in this study. Out of those 28 participants, 14 were diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) with a mean age of 7 and the other 14 were typically developing (TD) adolescents with a mean age of 7. 10 different language tests were administered to the 28 adolescents. .
The first test administered was The Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language, Third Edition (TACL-3) which, "assessed three categories of language understanding: Vocabulary, Grammatical Morphemes, and Elaborated Phrases and Sentences," (Kelley et al., 2006). The second test administered was The Expressive One-Word Picture Vocabulary Test (EOWPVT) which, "required the child to name a pictured stimulus, providing a standardized measure of expressive vocabulary," (Kelley et al., 2006). The Standford-Binet Memory for Sentences Subtest, administered third, requested children to repeat increasingly complex sentences to assess their verbal memory (Kelley et al.
