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broader developmental screen that successfully identifies children with developmental
delay as well as children with an ASD. In their most recent work, they have shown
that it is possible to prospectively identify towards the end of the first year of life
children who will go on to have a diagnosis of an ASD (Wetherby et al., 2008). This
is a goal that is shared by others who have developed instruments targeted at signs
identifiable before the end of the first year of life, although these remain to be fully
tested for their ability to prospectively identify ASDs at this age.
The First Year Inventory (FYI; Reznick, Baranek, Reavis, Watson, & Crais,
2007; Watson et al., 2007) is a questionnaire administered to infants' caregivers to
identify 12-month-olds in the general population who are at risk for atypical
development in general, but with a special focus on infants whose risk patterns are
most predictive of a future ASDs. The target behaviors depicted by the various items
are based on retrospective and prospective studies that suggested risk markers in
infancy for an eventual diagnosis of ASD. In this 63-item checklist, parents are asked
to describe their children on two major domains of social and communicative
behaviors (i.e., social orienting, receptive communication, social affective
engagement, imitation, and expressive communication) and on sensory and regulatory
behaviors (i.e., sensory processing, regulatory patterns, reactivity, and repetitive
behavior). A retrospective version of the FYI was administered to parents of
preschool children with ASD, children with other developmental disabilities, and
children with typical development, to strengthen the validity of the FYI and to
improve its utility for prospective screening of 12-month-olds both for infants from
the general population and infants at risk (Watson et al., 2007). Altogether findings
indicated that children at risk scored higher on the Social-Communication domain
than on the Sensory-Regulatory domain.