The emergence of object play in young children at elevated likelihood for autism

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

This prospective study investigated object exploration and combination play, in addition to (pre-)symbolic play in children at elevated likelihood for autism (EL; younger siblings of autistic children and very preterm children). Play of EL-children with (n = 22) and without (n = 61) a best-estimate research diagnosis of autism at 36 months was measured using detailed coding of direct observations at the (corrected) age of 10 and 14 months. As expected, autistic and non-autistic EL-children progressed to (pre-)symbolic play following the onset of combination play. There were no significant differences between both groups for most play behaviours at 10 and 14 months. Non-autistic EL-children did engage in more general combination play acts than autistic EL-children at 10 months. Moreover, 25% of the non-autistic EL-children showed general combination play, versus none of the autistic EL-children at 10 months. At 14 months, non-autistic EL-children spent slightly more of their playtime in spontaneous (pre-)symbolic play than autistic EL-children at 14 months. Object play behaviours were more similar than different between autistic and non-autistic EL-children at 10 and 14 months when playing alone. Our findings do not offer strong support for using solitary object play assessment as a method to identify autism in these very young EL-children.