Hand and Finger Functions and Characteristics of Line Drawing Movement in Preschool Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Preliminary Study

It is well known that children with autism spectrum disorder show handwriting difficulty. Although it is considered that not only cognitive but also motor impairments affect the difficulty, remarkably little is known about the motor characteristics of handwriting in autistic children. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate: 1) peculiarities of hand and finger functions; and 2) characteristics of handwriting movement in preschool children with ASD during the chrysalis stage of handwriting. Participants were children with ASD and age- and partially IQ-matched controls. We conducted assessment of muscle strength, motor coordination, separate finger movement, dexterity, grasp posture and line drawing movement. We compared data between ASD and control groups. Significant differences were observed in repetitive hand tapping, pronation and supination, sequential finger tapping, finger lifting and pegboard. Considering components of handwriting, there seems to be no prominent difference between the two groups in grasp posture, although ASD showed poorer motor coordination on the drawing line task compared to that of controls. The present results also showed atypical characteristics of hand and finger motor functions and line drawing movement in ASD. These findings provide further insight into the motor aspects of handwriting and suggest investigating correlation between hand and finger functions, especially separate finger movement and manual dexterity and motor aspect of handwriting may be important to clarify effective bottom up training for acquisition of handwriting skills.