The latent structure of the Delis-Kaplan system for autism.
Drop Verbal Fluency scores when you score the D-KEFS for autistic clients to get a steadier measure of executive function.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Reilly and the team looked at the Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System. This is a set of pencil-and-paper games that measure flexible thinking.
They asked, “Which parts of this test hang together for autistic people?” They used math models to see what fits and what does not.
What they found
Two big skills showed up: shifting rules and seeing patterns. These two held hands tightly.
The Verbal Fluency game broke the picture. When it stayed in, scores wobbled and the model looked messy. Dropping it made the test cleaner.
How this fits with other research
Grissom et al. (2024) looked at every old verbal-fluency paper. They say the task feels hard because autistic minds zoom deep into one track, not because of a broken brain. Both papers tell us: do not call a low score a deficit.
Rosenberg (1986) saw the same problem in play tests. Kids scored high on the Symbolic Play Test but still played like babies at recess. One test can oversell or undersell real life.
Bachman et al. (1988) and Van Herwegen et al. (2020) remind us that talking samples in autism need special care. Echoes, small sound banks, or tricky task rules can all fool the score sheet.
Why it matters
When you give the D-KEFS, skip or down-weight the Verbal Fluency number. Report the two strong factors: Cognitive Flexibility and Abstraction. This gives families a clearer picture of true executive skills and keeps you from writing goals for problems that may not exist.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A core feature of autism is deficits in executive functioning (EF), including difficulty with planning, cognitive flexibility, and working memory. Despite a growing need for evidence-based assessments of EF for autism populations, statistical models of many commonly used measures of EF, including the Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System (D-KEFS), have not been investigated for a sample of autistic participants. The purpose of this study was to address a gap in the literature regarding the latent structure of the D-KEFS in a sample of autistic individuals. The D-KEFS is one of the most widely used clinical assessments of executive function, but its factor structure has not been examined in a sample of autistic participants. Reliability analyses were performed for sample subgroups based on participants' clinical and demographic characteristics, including IQ, autism severity, age, and race/ethnicity. Verbal Fluency (VF) was found to consistently decrease or not affect the overall reliability score. Additionally, one- and two-factor structure models were tested for the D-KEFS with a sample of autistic participants. The one-factor model was not found to be a good fit for the data. However, the two-factor model, with Cognitive Flexibility and Abstraction latent factors, was found to fit the data relatively well. This two-factor model was reexamined excluding the VF observed variable, resulting in a better overall model fit. Communication deficits are a common feature of autism, which explains why the VF task, that requires participants to produce novel words, may not be an adequate measure of executive function for autism populations.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2024 · doi:10.1002/aur.3122