Electroencephalographic Correlate of Mexican Spanish Emotional Speech Processing in Autism Spectrum Disorder: To a Social Story and Robot-Based Intervention

Socio-emotional impairments are key symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorders. This work proposes to analyze the neuronal activity related to the discrimination of emotional prosodies in autistic children (aged 9 to 11-year-old) as follows. Firstly, a database for single words uttered in Mexican Spanish by males, females, and children will be created. Then, optimal acoustic features for emotion characterization will be extracted, followed of a cubic kernel function Support Vector Machine (SVM) in order to validate the speech corpus. As a result, human-specific acoustic properties of emotional voice signals will be identified. Secondly, those identified acoustic properties will be modified to synthesize the recorded human emotional voices. Thirdly, both human and synthesized utterances will be used to study the electroencephalographic correlate of affective prosody processing in typically developed and autistic children. Finally, and on the basis of the outcomes, synthesized voice-enhanced environments will be created to develop an intervention based on social-robot and Social Story^TM for autistic children to improve affective prosodies discrimination. This protocol has been registered at BioMed Central under the following number: ISRCTN18117434.

Evaluation of the Autism Spectrum Rating Scales in a Diverse, Nonclinical Sample

Despite the changing racial/ethnic demographics in the United States, few studies exist that evaluate autism spectrum disorder (ASD) screening and diagnostic assessment measures for their cultural and linguistic responsiveness. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the structure of the Autism Spectrum Rating Scales (ASRS) in a diverse sample of parents with children (nonclinical sample) between the ages of 6 and 18 years ( N = 405). Confirmatory factor analyses, factor correlations, and the evaluation of item loadings were used to examine the structure of the ASRS across cultural groups. Results yielded cross-cultural differences. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Assessing the Accuracy of the Modified Chinese Autism Spectrum Rating Scale and Social Responsiveness Scale for Screening Autism Spectrum Disorder in Chinese Children

The reported prevalence of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been increasing rapidly in many parts of the world. However, data on its prevalence in China are largely missing. Here, we assessed the suitability of the modified Chinese version of a newly-developed ASD screening tool, the Modified Chinese Autism Spectrum Rating Scales (MC-ASRS) in screening for ASD in Chinese children aged 6–12 years, through comparison with the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) that has been widely used for ASD screening. We recruited the parents/caregivers of 1588 typically-developing children and 190 children with ASD aged 6–12 years to complete the MC-ASRS and SRS, and evaluated the validity of both scales in discriminating children with ASD from those developing typically. The results showed that MC-ASRS performed as well as SRS in sensitivity, specificity, and area-under-the-curve (both >0.95) in receiver operating characteristic analysis, with a fair false-negative rate. These results suggest that MC-ASRS is a promising tool for screening for children with ASD in the general Chinese population.

Efficacy of the ADEC in Identifying Autism Spectrum Disorder in Clinically Referred Toddlers in the US

The Autism Detection in Early Childhood (ADEC) is a brief, play-based screening tool for the assessment of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in children aged 12-36 months. We examined the psychometric properties of the ADEC in a clinical sample of toddlers (n = 114) referred to a US pediatric hospital for assessment due to concerns of developmental delay or ASD. The ADEC (cutoff = 11) returned good sensitivity (.93-.94) but poorer specificity (.62-.64) for best estimate clinical diagnosis of ASD, and compared favorably with the ADOS-2. Internal consistency was acceptable, α = .80, and inter-rater reliability was high, ICC = .95. Results support the use of the ADEC as a clinical screen for ASD.