exposure from ADHD with 73.9% clarification accuracy. Thus, while the within-group variability of executive function performance is sufficient to accurately distinguish these clinical conditions (Mattson, et al., 2013), the current results support the use of other, potentially more sensitive measures for heavy prenatal alcohol exposure, such as verbal comprehension and perceptual reasoning performance, to differentiate the clinical groups. Importantly, the lack of significant group differences in executive function ability does not obviate the need for intervention and remediation as they are both impaired compared to controls. Of note, verbal fluency was an important variable in distinguishing AE from ADHD in the 2013 study (Mattson, et al., 2013). In the current study, while EF measures overall were not significantly different between the clinical groups, performance on verbal fluency was marginally significant, given our adjusted p-value. This provides further evidence that verbal measures may be more sensitive to heavy prenatal alcohol exposure.
