ArticleAutism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research2023
Fine motor skill and expressive language in minimally verbal and verbal school-aged autistic children.
Article in Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 14 citations in OpenAlex.
- Examining the Transition from Single Words to Phrase Speech in Children with ASD: A Systematic Review.Clinical child and family psychology review · 2024Pooled it
- Multimodal predictors of spoken vocabulary development in autism: the role of early childhood brain and behavior.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Examining the Utility of the W-ADL to Assess Daily Living Skills in Non- or Minimally Speaking Autistic Adults.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2026Article
- Sound-symbol correspondence in autism: TheResearch in autism · 2026Article
- Sub-groups of spoken language and broader communication skills in a large heterogenous cohort of minimally verbal school-age children: evidence of discrepant profiles.Molecular autism · 2026Article
- Assessing Language Skills in Children Aged 4 to 6 Years with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Prospective Study.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Sensory-movement underpinnings of lifelong neurodivergence: getting a grip on autism.Frontiers in integrative neuroscience · 2025Article
- Receptive language and receptive-expressive discrepancy in minimally verbal autistic children and adolescents.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2024Article
- Prosodic signatures of ASD severity and developmental delay in preschoolers.NPJ digital medicine · 2023Article
- The State of Natural Language Sampling in Autism Research: A Scoping Review.Autism & developmental language impairmentsReview
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Fine motor skill is associated with expressive language outcomes in infants who have an autistic sibling and in young autistic children. Fewer studies have focused on school-aged children even though around 80% have motor impairments and 30% remain minimally verbal (MV) into their school years. Moreover, expressive language is not a unitary construct, but it is made up of components such as speech production, structural language, and social-pragmatic language use. We used natural language sampling to investigate the relationship between fine motor and speech intelligibility, mean length of utterance and conversational turns in MV and verbal autistic children between the ages of 4 and 7 while controlling for age and adaptive behavior. Fine motor skill predicted speech production, measured by percent intelligible utterances. Fine motor skill and adaptive behavior predicted structural language, measured by mean length of utterance in morphemes. Adaptive behavior, but not fine motor skill, predicted social-pragmatic language use measured by number of conversational turns. Simple linear regressions by group corrected for multiple comparisons showed that fine motor skill predicted intelligibility for MV but not verbal children. Fine motor skill and adaptive behavior predicted mean length of utterance for both MV and verbal children. These findings suggest that future studies should explore whether MV children may benefit from interventions targeting fine motor along with speech and language into their school years.
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