Patterns of Communication, Cognition, and Adaptive Behavior in Children with Developmental Delays

Young children with developmental disabilities (DD) can demonstrate a wide range of difficulties in different domains including cognition, language and adaptive behaviors. Accurately assessing these difficulties and characterizing patterns of strengths and weaknesses is important for informing intervention strategies (Ben-Sasson & Gill, 2014; Plesa Skwerer, Jordan, Brukilacchio & Tager-Flusberg, 2016). The current study examines how toddlers with a significant developmental delay and less than 10 spoken words perform across different developmental domains, (i.e., cognitive, language and adaptive functioning) and across assessment methods, (i.e., parent report and clinician-administered). Results indicated that parent-reported and clinician-administered measures of cognition, language and adaptive functioning are highly related, as are young children’s performances across these domains. Findings also revealed that children with similarly limited spoken language can exhibit a variety of strengths and weaknesses in other domains