All 15 participants were administered the Test of Nonverbal
Intelligence-Third Edition (TONI-3) [44] to determine their
respective intellectual levels in terms of Nonverbal Intelligence
Quotient (NIQ). TONI-3 is one of the better language-free IQ
tests that can be easily administered on nonverbal children
with autism [45]. This norm-referenced nonlinguistic problem
solving ability assessment tool is administered to identify if a
participant has intellectual impairment or cognitive, language
or motor impairments due to neurological conditions. Anyone
with an NIQ of below 80 is considered as having intellectual
deficiency.
At the same time, the parents of these participants were
given the questionnaire from the Gilliam Autism Rating Scale
(GARS) [46] to complete. The GARS would provide the
research team the Autism Quotient (AQ) of each participant.
Higher AQ means the child has a more severe form of autism.
The GARS uses a 42-item parent-report behavior checklist
intended to help identify those who have a high likelihood of
autism. Each subtest raw score is converted to a standard score
with a mean of 100 and a percentile rank. In addition, subtests
are summed to generate an overall GARS total score which
is converted into a standardized Autism Quotient and overall
percentile rank.