Gaze avoidance and perseverative language in fragile X syndrome and autism spectrum disorder: brief report.
Laura Friedman, Audra Sterling, Andrea Barton-Hulsey
PMID 29333915WHAT IT FOUND
Boys with fragile X syndrome plus autism and boys with autism showed similarly high gaze avoidance, but the fragile X group repeated single utterances more often.
Gaze avoidance and language perseverations were not related in either group.
Key findings
01Boys with FXS+ASD avoided gaze 82.09% of the time and boys with ASD avoided gaze 77.80%, and the difference was not significant.
02Boys with FXS+ASD produced significantly more single utterance perseverations than boys with ASD.
03Gaze avoidance and perseverative language were not significantly related in either group.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The sample was small, so the findings may not represent the wider range of boys with these conditions. The boys with FXS+ASD had lower nonverbal IQ than the boys with ASD, so group differences cannot be separated cleanly from IQ. The study did not compare boys with FXS only, so it cannot show what ASD added to FXS. Girls were excluded, so it says nothing about girls with FXS or ASD. A perseverative language code had only fair coder agreement, so its result is less certain. The correlations were underpowered, so a larger sample could still find a link between gaze avoidance and perseverative language.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat the higher single utterance perseverations in the fragile X group as proof that fragile X alone causes this conversational pattern. The groups differed in nonverbal IQ, and the sample was small, so chance cannot be ruled out.