The Utility of Manual and Automatic Linguistic Error Codes for Identifying Neurodevelopmental Disorders ∗

We investigate the utility of linguistic features for automatically differentiating between children with varying combinations of two potentially comorbid neurodevelopmental disorders: autism spectrum disorder and specific language impairment. We find that certain manual codes for linguistic errors are useful for distinguishing between diagnostic groups. We investigate the relationship between coding detail and diagnostic classification performance, and find that a simple coding scheme is of high diagnostic utility. We propose a simple method to automate the pared down coding scheme, and find that these automatic codes are of diagnostic utility