Sleep Problems and Language Disorders in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Language disorders are common in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). It seems that children who suffer from sleep problems usually suffer from more severe disturbances in other linguistic areas, as well. Accordingly, the aim of this study was to compare language disorders in children with autism with sleep problems to children with autism with no sleep problems.

This was a cross-sectional study. The statistical population for this study included all children with autism aged between 7 and 12 years. Purposeful sampling through Children's Sleep Habits Questionnaire (CSHQ) test was applied to select a sample of 38 subjects, which was divided into two groups of 19 according to presence of sleep problems. The subjects were then evaluated through continuous speech quality testing.

Higher mean and standard deviation (SD) of scores of mean length utterance (2.93 ± 2.01), speech rate (74.13 ± 1.58), number of verbs (11.72 ± 2.61), lexical enrichment (16.00 ± 1.55), and echolalia (2.81 ± 1.10) was observed among children with autism with sleep problems as compared to children with autism without sleep problems (P < 0.05) The findings also showed that the difference in mean scores in subscale of the number of lexical words was not significant.

According to the findings of this study, it seems that sleep disorders may be one of the factors affecting language learning and continuous speech quality in children with autism.