Motor deficits in children with autism spectrum disorder: a cross-syndrome study.
Clumsy movements travel with language delays, not just autism, so always assess motor skills in language-impaired clients.
01Research in Context
What this study did
McPhillips et al. (2014) compared motor skills in three groups of children. One group had autism. One group had specific language impairment. One group was typically developing.
The team gave each child the same large motor test. They wanted to know if clumsiness is only an autism problem.
What they found
Both the autism and the language-impaired kids scored far below the typical kids. The two clinical groups looked almost the same.
Clumsy movements are not a red flag for autism alone. They show up whenever language is delayed.
How this fits with other research
Carment et al. (2020) widened the lens. They added adults with schizophrenia and still saw the same story: poor motor control is shared across diagnoses.
Storch et al. (2012) went earlier and deeper. They linked poor perceptual-motor skills to worse social-communication scores in autism, hinting that motor trouble may ripple into language and social domains.
de Moraes et al. (2020) seems to disagree. They found that autistic youth learn motor skills better in virtual reality than typical peers do. But their study trained skills, while Martin only measured them. Training can work even when baseline skills are low, so the papers answer different questions.
Why it matters
If a child has language delays, screen for motor delays even when autism is not on the table. Add balance, catching, or finger-strength goals to the same plan that targets words. You may pick up a second barrier to learning that no one flagged.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Recent research suggests that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience some level of motor difficulty, and that this may be associated with social communication skills. However, other studies show that children with language impairments, but without the social communication problems, are at risk of motor difficulties as well. The aim of the present study was to determine if children with ASD have syndrome-specific motor deficits in comparison to children with specific language impairment (SLI). We used an independent groups design with three groups of children (8-10 years old) matched on age and nonverbal IQ: an ASD group, an SLI group, and a typically developing (TD) group. All of the children completed an individually administered, standardized motor assessment battery. We found that the TD group demonstrated significantly better motor skills than either the ASD or SLI groups. Detailed analyses of the motor subtests revealed that the ASD and SLI groups had very similar motor profiles across a range of fine and gross motor skills, with one exception. We conclude that children with ASD, and SLI, are at risk of clinically significant motor deficits. However, future behavioral and neurological studies of motor skills in children with ASD should include an SLI comparison group in order to identify possible autism-specific deficits.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2014 · doi:10.1002/aur.1408