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Our purpose was to study the frequency of behavioral-emotional problems among children identified with a learning disability (LD). The data were obtained for 579 Finnish children (8-15 years) with reading disability (RD-only), math disability (MD-only), or both (RDMD) assessed at a specialized clinic between 1985 and 2017. We analyzed percentages of children with behavioral-emotional symptoms reaching clinical range (i.e., z score [greater than or equal to]1.5 SDs) and the effects of the LD type, gender, and context (home vs. school) on them. Furthermore, we analyzed the effect of the severity of LD and gender on the amount of behavioral-emotional symptoms reported by teachers and parents. Alarmingly high percentages of children, irrespective of LD type, demonstrated behavioral-emotional problems: more than 37% in Affective, Anxiety, and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) problems. Contextual variation was large, as more problems were reported by teachers than by mothers. The unique effects of gender and LD type were rare, but the results raised concern for those with MD-only, especially boys. The results underscore the need to draw attention to the importance of assessing children with LD for behavioral-emotional problems and emphasize the importance of teachers' awareness of behavioral-emotional problems among students with LD and cooperation among child, teacher, and parents in assessment and support planning.

Previous research supports the CBCL/1½--5's "DSM"-ASD scale (and its precursor, the "DSM"-PDP scale) as a Level 1 ASD screener. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) with data from population samples in 24 societies (N = 19,850) indicated good measurement invariance across societies, especially for configural and metric invariance. Items 4. 25, 67, 80, and 98 may be especially good discriminators of ASD because they have tend to have low base rates, strong loadings on the ASD latent construct, and the best measurement invariance across societies. Further research is needed to test the discriminative power of these items in predicting ASD, but our strong measurement findings support the international psychometric robustness of the CBCL/1½--5's "DSM"-ASD scale. [This article was co-written by the International Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment (ASEBA) Consortium.]

There are few studies of behavior problems in preterm children prior to 2 years old and the changes that occur over time. The aims of this study were to examine the patterns and prediction of behavior problems and the effects of gender and socioeconomic status (SES) on behavior problems in preterm children at the toddler and preschool periods. Parents of 124 very low birthweight preterm children completed a standardized behavior questionnaire at 18 months corrected age and 3 years old. At both times, scores were significantly higher on Attention and Withdrawn Problems than on other behavior problem syndromes. There was a significant overall increase in Externalizing and Internalizing behavior problem scores between 18 months and 3 years, particularly in Internalizing problems. Overall prediction for normal versus not-normal categorization ([greater than or equal to]1 standard deviation) on behavior problem and broad-spectrum scales ranged from 77% to 90% and was higher for children in the normal than not-normal categories. Boys had higher Internalizing Problems at 18 months and higher Externalizing Problems at 3 years. Children from low SES families had higher Internalizing and Total Behavior problems at 18 months and higher Internalizing, Externalizing, and Total Behavior problems at 3 years. Screening preterm children for behavior problems before 2 years old appears useful for early intervention of such problems.

This study tested international similarities and differences in scores on a scale comprising 12 items identified by international mental health experts as being very consistent with the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (5th ed.) category of autism spectrum disorder. Participants were 19,850 preschoolers in 24 societies rated by parents on the Child Behavior Checklist for Ages 1½-5; 10,521 preschoolers from 15 societies rated by caregivers/teachers on the Caregiver--Teacher Report Form, and 7380 children from 13 societies rated by both types of informant. Rank ordering of the items with respect to base rates and mean ratings was more similar across societies for parent ratings than caregiver/teacher ratings, especially with respect to the items tapping restricted interests and repetitive behaviors. Items 80. "Strange behavior;" 63. "Repeatedly rocks head or body;" 67. "Seems unresponsive to affection;" and 98. "Withdrawn, doesn't get involved with others" had low base rates in these population samples across societies and types of informants, suggesting that they may be particularly discriminating for identifying autism spectrum disorder in young children. Cross-informant agreement was stronger for the items tapping social communication and interaction problems than restricted interests and repetitive behaviors. The findings support the feasibility of international use of the scale for autism spectrum disorder screening in population samples.

We analyzed CBCL/1½-5 Pervasive Developmental Problems (DSM-PDP) scores in 3- to 5-year-olds from the Study to Explore Early Development (SEED), a multi-site case control study, with the objective to discriminate children with ASD (N = 656) from children with Developmental Delay (DD) (N = 646), children with Developmental Delay (DD) plus ASD features (DD-AF) (N = 284), and population controls (POP) (N = 827). ASD diagnosis was confirmed with the ADOS and ADI-R. With a cut-point of T = 65, sensitivity was 80% for ASD, with specificity varying across groups: POP (0.93), DD-noAF (0.85), and DD-AF (0.50). One-way ANOVA yielded a large group effect (?[superscript 2] = 0.50). Our results support the CBCL/1½-5's as a time-efficient ASD screener for identifying preschoolers needing further evaluation.

Children with language disorders have particular difficulty with verbs, but when this difficulty emerges is unknown. We examined syntactic (transitive, intransitive, ditransitive) and semantic (manner, result) features of two-year-olds' verb vocabularies, contrasting late talkers and typically developing children to look for early differences in verb vocabulary. We conducted a retrospective analysis of parent-reported expressive vocabulary from the Language Development Survey (N = 564, N(LT) = 62) (Rescorla, 1989). Verbs were coded for the presence or absence of each syntactic and semantic feature. Binomial mixed-effects regressions revealed the effect of feature on children's knowledge and whether feature interacted with group classification. Our results revealed mostly similarities between late talkers and typically developing children. All children's vocabularies showed a bias against verbs that occur in ditransitive frames. One feature showed a difference between groups: late talkers showed a bias against manner verbs that typically developing children did not.

Although the Child Behavior Checklist 1½-5's 12-item "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders"-Autism Spectrum Problems Scale (formerly called Pervasive Developmental Problems scale) has been used in several studies as an autism spectrum disorder screener, the base rate and stability of its items and its measurement model have not been previously studied. We therefore examined the structure, longitudinal invariance, and stability of the Child Behavior Checklist 1½-5's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders"-Autism Spectrum Problems Scale in the diverse Generation R (Rotterdam) sample based on mothers' ratings at 18 months (n = 4695), 3 years (n = 4571), and 5 years (n = 5752). Five items that seemed especially characteristic of autism spectrum disorder had low base rates at all three ages. The rank order of base rates for the 12 items was highly correlated over time (Qs ? 0.86), but the longitudinal stability of individual items was modest (phi coefficients = 0.15-0.34). Confirmatory factor analyses indicated that the autism spectrum disorder scale model manifested configural, metric, and scalar longitudinal invariance over the time period from 18 months to 5 years, with large factor loadings. Correlations over time for observed autism spectrum disorder scale scores (0.25-0.50) were generally lower than the correlations across time of the latent factors (0.45-0.68). Results indicated significant associations of the autism spectrum disorder scale with later autism spectrum disorder diagnoses.

The screening power of the CBCL/1½-5's Withdrawn and "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders"-Pervasive Developmental Problems (DSM-PDP) scales to identify children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at 24 months was tested in a longitudinal, familial high-risk study. Participants were 56 children at high risk for autism spectrum disorder due to an affected older sibling (high-risk group) and 26 low-risk children with a typically developing older sibling (low-risk group). At 24 months, 13 of the 56 high-risk children were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, whereas the other 43 were not. The high-risk children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder group had significantly higher scores on the CBCL/1½-5's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders"-Pervasive Developmental Problems and Withdrawn scales than children in the low-risk and high-risk children not diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder groups ([eta][subscript p][superscript 2]>0.50). Receiver operating characteristic analyses yielded very high area under the curve values (0.91 and 0.89), and a cut point of T [greater than or equal to] 60 yielded sensitivity of 77% and specificity of 97% to 99% between the high-risk children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and the combination of low-risk and high-risk children not diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Consistent with several previous studies, the CBCL/1½-5's "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders"-Pervasive Developmental Problems scale and the Withdrawn syndrome differentiated well between children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and those not diagnosed.

Purpose: The objective of this study was to compare vocabulary size and composition in 2-year-olds learning Polish or English as measured by the Language Development Survey (LDS; Rescorla, 1989). Method: Participants were 199 Polish toddlers (M = 24.14 months, SD = 0.35) and 422 U.S. toddlers (M = 24.69 months, SD = 0.78). Results: Test-retest reliability was 0.92, internal consistency was 0.99, and concurrent validity was 0.55. Girls had higher vocabulary scores than boys. Mean LDS score was significantly lower in Polish than in English, and fewer Polish children had LDS scores >200 words. Also, more words were reported for <25% of the children, and fewer words were reported for =75% of the children, in Polish than in English. The cross-linguistic correlation for word frequencies was 0.44. Noun dominance was comparable in the two languages, and 55 cross-linguistic word matches were found among the top 100 words. Although more Polish than U.S. children had <50 words (18.1% vs. 8.3%), children with <50 words and those with =50 words were generally acquiring the same words. Conclusions: Vocabulary acquisition appeared to be slower in Polish than in English, probably because of the complexity of the language. However, the languages were very similar with respect to vocabulary composition findings.

Purpose: Our objective was to replicate previous cross­linguistic findings by comparing Portuguese and U.S. children with respect to (a) effects of language, gender, and age on vocabulary size; (b) lexical composition; and (c) late talking. Method: We used the Language Development Survey (LDS; Rescorla, 1989) with children (18-35 months) learning European Portuguese (n = 181) and English (n = 206). Results: In both languages, girls had higher vocabulary scores than boys and vocabulary scores increased with age. Portuguese LDS scores were significantly lower than English scores, but the effect size was small. Cross­linguistic concordance of percentage use scores yielded a Q correlation of 0.50, with 64 of the "top 100" words being exact matches. Cross­linguistic concordance was highest for the youngest age group. In both languages, vocabulary composition in late talkers (children = 24 months with < 50 words) was highly correlated with composition in vocabulary size­matched younger children. Conclusions: Results replicated previous Greek, Korean, and Italian LDS studies. The early lexicons of typical talkers and late talkers contained many of the same words, indicating considerable universality and suggesting good targets for clinical intervention.

The present study examined the relation between language and social ability in a sample of 268 preschoolers aged 18-35 months. Expressive language was assessed with the Italian adaptation of the Language Development Survey (LDS), and Social Competence was assessed with the Questionnaire on Peer Interactions in the Kindergarten (QPI). Results showed that language measures (LDS Vocabulary, LDS MLU and the opportunity scores of the LDS category of People Words) predicted social competence (Total QPI score and the standardised scores of the "Popularity", "Prosociality", "Aggressiveness", "Adult Dependence", and "Isolation" factors), above and beyond the proportion of variance explained by age. In addition, children with delayed language development (who were older than 24 months and produced fewer than 50 words) exhibited lower social abilities, compared to age-matched children. These findings support the conclusion that language skills play a critical role for social adjustment.

To test the Child Behavior Checklist's (CBCL/1½-5) ability to screen for autism spectrum disorders (ASD), we studied Korean preschoolers: 46 with ASD, 111 with developmental delay (DD), 71 with other psychiatric disorders (OPD), and 228 non-referred (NR). The ASD group scored significantly higher than the other groups on the Withdrawn and DSM-Pervasive Developmental Problems (DSM-PDP) scales as well as attaining higher scores (p < 0.001) on seven items reflecting ASD. With a T = 65 cutpoint on the DSM-PDP scale, sensitivity was 80% for identifying ASD relative to the other three groups, but specificity varied across groups: NR = 87%, OPD = 55%, DD = 60%, replicating in a non-Western sample results from previous studies. Results suggested that the CBCL/1½-5 performs best in Level 1 screening, namely differentiating children with ASD from children in the general population.

Purpose: This study reports age 5 morphology and syntax skills in late talkers identified at age 2 (n = 34) and typically developing comparison children (n = 20). Results: The late talkers manifested significant morphological delays at ages 3 and 4 relative to comparison peers. Based on the 14 morphemes analyzed at age 5, the only significant group difference was on the third person regular "-s" inflection. This was also the only significant difference when we compared late talkers with continuing delay, late bloomers (who scored within 1 standard deviation of the comparison group in mean length of utterance), and typically developing peers. The late talker and comparison children differed greatly in mean total scores on the Index of Productive Syntax (Scarborough, 1990), a measure of syntactic complexity. The group with continuing delay scored significantly lower on the IPSyn than the late bloomer and typically developing groups, which did not differ from each other. Conclusions: Findings are consistent with the higher order language group differences found through adolescence in these late talkers relative to comparison peers with similar socioeconomic status and similar nonverbal abilities, supporting the notion that late talkers have an ongoing weakness in language endowment that manifests differently over the course of development.

Objective: We used latent class analysis (LCA) to examine the prevalence and characteristics of the Dysregulation Profile (DP) based on data from the Child Behavior Checklist for Ages 6–18. The DP comprises elevated scores on the Anxious/Depressed, Attention Problems, and Aggressive Behavior syndromes and thus reflects significant problems in self-regulation of mood, attention, and behavior. Method: We examined CBCL data for 56,666 children ages 6 to 16 in 29 societies, many of which are countries but some of which are not (e.g., Hong Kong, Puerto Rico). The 29 societies varied widely in race/ethnicity, religion, geographic location, political/economic system, and population size. Results: The various statistical indices for good LCA model fit, while not always consistent, supported a DP class in every society. The omnicultural mean probability of assignment to the DP class (mean of the societal means) was 93% (SD = 2.4%). Prevalence of the DP class ranged from 2% to 18% across societies, with an omnicultural mean prevalence of 9%. In every society, the DP class had significantly higher scores than the pooled non-DP classes on all three DP syndromes. The 8-syndrome T score profile for the DP class in many societies featured elevations on all eight CBCL syndromes. Conclusions: Although the same instrument, analytic procedures, and decision rules were used in these 29 samples, model fit, the number of classes, and the prevalence of the DP class varied across societies. High scores on the three DP syndromes often co-occurred with high scores on most other CBCL syndromes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]