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Background  Qualitatively atypical language development characterized by non-sequential skill acquisition within a developmental domain, which has been called developmental  deviance  or  difference , is a common characteristic of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We developed the Response Dispersion Index (RDI), a measure of this phenomenon based on intra-subtest scatter of item responses on standardized psychometric assessments, to assess the within-task variability among individuals with language impairment (LI) and/or ASD.    Methods  Standard clinical assessments of language were administered to 502 individuals from the New Jersey Language and Autism Genetics Study (NJLAGS) cohort. Participants were divided into four diagnostic groups: unaffected, ASD-only, LI-only, and ASD + LI. For each language measure, RDI was defined as the product of the total number of test items and the sum of the weight (based on item difficulty) of test items missed. Group differences in RDI were assessed, and the relationship between RDI and ASD diagnosis among individuals with LI was investigated for each language assessment.    Results  Although standard scores were unable to distinguish the LI-only and ASD/ASD + LI groups, the ASD/ASD + LI groups had higher RDI scores compared to LI-only group across all measures of expressive, pragmatic, and metalinguistic language. RDI was positively correlated with quantitative ASD traits across all subgroups and was an effective predictor of ASD diagnosis among individuals with LI.    Conclusions  The RDI is an effective quantitative metric of developmental deviance/difference that correlates with ASD traits, supporting previous associations between ASD and non-sequential skill acquisition. The RDI can be adapted to other clinical measures to investigate the degree of difference that is not captured by standard performance summary scores.    Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (10.1186/s11689-019-9283-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Within-task variability on standardized language tests predicts autism spectrum disorder: a pilot study of the Response Dispersion Index