Bengali translation and characterisation of four cognitive and trait measures for autism spectrum conditions in India.
Alokananda Rudra, Jai Ranjan Ram, Tom Loucas and 2 others
PMID 27980709WHAT IT FOUND
Bengali versions of four autism-related tests distinguished children with autism from controls in Kolkata, covering emotion recognition, empathy, and visual search.
They may help describe traits in Bengali-speaking children, but were not tested as clinical decision-making measures.
Key findings
01The study found group differences on all translated measures used in the study.
02ASC children were faster than controls on the visual search task, but their accuracy was not different.
03Across the combined sample, higher empathy scores were associated with better emotion recognition, but this association was not significant within the ASC group.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The ASC and control groups were not matched for age or IQ; the ASC group had mean age 11.57 and mean verbal IQ 87.9, while controls had mean age 9.92 and mean verbal IQ 100.8. Only high-functioning verbal children were tested, so the findings do not apply to nonverbal children or children with lower verbal abilities. Diagnoses were based on existing certified reports and AQ-C scores, not a new research ADOS confirmation. The sample came from urban Kolkata schools and clinics serving middle or low-middle SES populations. It is difficult to extrapolate these results to the extreme low end of SES or to rural populations. Within the ASC group, correlations among empathy, trait scores, and emotion recognition were not significant.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat these tools as ready-made diagnostic or therapy-planning instruments for Bengali-speaking children. They were tested only in 25 high-functioning verbal children with ASC and 26 controls, and the paper reports group scores rather than clinical decision-making.