Remote Infant Studies of Early Learning (RISE): Scalable online replications of key findings in infant cognitive development.

The current article describes the Remote Infant Studies of Early Learning, a battery intended to provide robust looking time measures of cognitive development that can be administered remotely to inform our understanding of individual developmental trajectories in typical and atypical populations, particularly infant siblings of autistic children. This battery was developed to inform our understanding of early cognitive and language development in infants who will later receive a diagnosis of autism. Using tasks that have been successfully implemented in lab-based paradigms, we included assessments of attention, memory, prediction, word recognition, numeracy, multimodal processing, and social evaluation.

Frequency, Form and Function of Dyadic Questions in Children with Autism: A CHILDES corpus study.

Children's questions to their caregivers - and caregivers' questions to their children - play an important role in child development. For children on the autism spectrum, who often experience cognitive, linguistic and social difficulties, prior research on questions has resulted in inconsistent and incomplete findings. The present study characterized the frequency, form, and function of queries posed by children on the autism spectrum ( = 12), non-spectrum peers ( =20), and parents using the in the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES).

Conventions for unconventional language: Revisiting a framework for spoken language features in autism.

Background And Aims: Autism has long been characterized by a range of spoken language features, including, for instance: the tendency to repeat words and phrases, the use of invented words, and "pedantic" language. These observations have been the source of considerable disagreement in both the theoretical and applied realms. Despite persistent professional interest in these language features, there has been little consensus around terminology, definitions and developmental/clinical interpretation.

Word imageability is associated with expressive vocabulary in children with autism spectrum disorder.

Background & Aims: Throughout typical development, children prioritize different perceptual, social, and linguistic cues to learn words. The earliest acquired words are often those that are perceptually salient and highly imageable. Imageability, the ease in which a word evokes a mental image, is a strong predictor for word age of acquisition in typically developing (TD) children, independent of other lexicosemantic features such as word frequency.

Parental tuning of language input to autistic and nonspectrum children.

Caregivers' language input supports children's language development, and it is often tuned to the child's current level of skill. Evidence suggests that parental input is tuned to accommodate children's expressive language levels, but accommodation to receptive language abilities is less understood. In particular, little is known about parental sensitivity to children's abilities to process language in real time.

Consistency and inconsistency in caregiver reporting of vocabulary.

Vocabulary checklists completed by caregivers are a common way of measuring children's vocabulary knowledge. We provide evidence from checklist data from 31 children with and without autism spectrum disorder. When asked to report twice about whether or not their child produces a particular word, caregivers are largely consistent in their responses, but where they are inconsistent, these inconsistencies affect verbs more than nouns.

Personal Pronoun Errors in Form versus Meaning Produced by Children with and without Autism Spectrum Disorder.

The current study investigates whether the types of pronominal errors children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) make are different from those of their TD peers at similar stages of language development. A recent review about language acquisition in ASD argues that these children show relative deficits in assigning/extending lexical meaning alongside relative strengths in morpho-syntax (Naigles & Tek, 2017). Pronouns provide an ideal test case for this argument because they are marked both for grammatical features (case) and features that reflect qualities of the referent itself (gender and number) or the referent's role in conversation (person).

Identifying Childhood Expressive Language Features That Best Predict Adult Language and Communication Outcome in Individuals With Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Purpose Several studies have reported that "useful speech" at 5 years of age predicts outcomes in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but this skill has been vaguely defined. This study investigates which specific aspects of expressive language in children with ASD best predict adult language and communication outcomes. Method Language samples from 29 children (ages 47-72 months) enrolled in a longitudinal project (e.

The robustness of eye-mouth index as an eye-tracking metric of social attention in toddlers.

Eye-tracking research on social attention in infants and toddlers has included heterogeneous stimuli and analysis techniques. This allows measurement of looking to inner facial features under diverse conditions but restricts across-study comparisons. Eye-mouth index (EMI) is a measure of relative preference for looking to the eyes or mouth, independent of time spent attending to the face.

Toddlers' word learning through overhearing: Others' attention matters.

In laboratory settings children are able to learn new words from overheard interactions, yet in naturalistic contexts this is often not the case. We investigated the degree to which joint attention within the overheard interaction facilitates overheard learning. In the study, 20 2-year-olds were tested on novel words they had been exposed to in two different overhearing contexts: one in which both interlocutors were attending to the interaction and one in which one interlocutor was not attending.

Personal pronoun usage in maternal input to infants at high vs. low risk for autism spectrum disorder.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are prone to personal pronoun difficulties. This paper investigates maternal input as a potential contributing factor, focusing on an early developmental stage before ASD diagnosis. Using Quigley and McNally's (2013) corpus of maternal speech to infants (3-19 months; N = 19) who are either at high or low risk for a diagnosis of ASD (Quigley & McNally, 2013), we asked whether mothers used fewer pronouns with high-risk infants.

Lexical Development in Young Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD): How ASD May Affect Intake From the Input.

Purpose: Most children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have below-age lexical knowledge and lexical representation. Our goal is to examine ways in which difficulties with social communication and language processing that are often associated with ASD may constrain these children's abilities to learn new words and to explore whether minimizing the social communication and processing demands of the learning situation can lead to successful learning.

Method: In this narrative review of recent work on lexical development in ASD, we describe key findings on children's acquisition of nouns, pronouns, and verbs and outline our research program currently in progress aimed at further elucidating these issues.

Brief Report: Learning Language Through Overhearing in Children with ASD.

We explored whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) learn new nouns from overheard speech. Thirteen children (4-5 years) with ASD participated in an Addressed condition, in which they were directly taught a novel label (e.g.

Differential Attention to Faces in Infant Siblings of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Associations with Later Social and Language Ability.

A growing body of literature has begun to explore social attention in infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with hopes of identifying early differences that are associated with later ASD or other aspects of development. The present study used eye-tracking to familiar (mother) and unfamiliar (stranger) faces in two groups of 6-month-old infants: infants with no family history of ASD (low-risk controls; LRC), and infants at high risk for ASD (HRA), by virtue of having an older sibling with ASD. HRA infants were further characterized based on autism classification at 24 months or older as HRA- (HRA without an ASD outcome) or HRA+ (HRA with an ASD outcome).

Effects of early institutionalization on emotion processing in 12-year-old youth.

We examined facial emotion recognition in 12-year-olds in a longitudinally followed sample of children with and without exposure to early life psychosocial deprivation (institutional care). Half of the institutionally reared children were randomized into foster care homes during the first years of life. Facial emotion recognition was examined in a behavioral task using morphed images.

Testing the effects of expression, intensity and age on emotional face processing in ASD.

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) commonly show global deficits in the processing of facial emotion, including impairments in emotion recognition and slowed processing of emotional faces. Growing evidence has suggested that these challenges may increase with age, perhaps due to minimal improvement with age in individuals with ASD. In the present study, we explored the role of age, emotion type and emotion intensity in face processing for individuals with and without ASD.

The effects of early institutionalization on emotional face processing: evidence for sparing via an experience-dependent mechanism.

Early psychosocial deprivation has profound adverse effects on children's brain and behavioural development, including abnormalities in physical growth, intellectual function, social cognition, and emotional development. Nevertheless, the domain of emotional face processing has appeared in previous research to be relatively spared; here, we test for possible sleeper effects emerging in early adolescence. This study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the neural correlates of facial emotion processing in 12-year-old children who took part in a randomized controlled trial of foster care as an intervention for early institutionalization.

Greater Pupil Size in Response to Emotional Faces as an Early Marker of Social-Communicative Difficulties in Infants at High Risk for Autism.

When scanning faces, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have shown reduced visual attention (e.g., less time on eyes) and atypical autonomic responses (e.

The integrity of lexical acquisition mechanisms in autism spectrum disorders: A research review.

Research on autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has rapidly expanded in recent years, yielding important developments in both theory and practice. While we have gained important insights into how children with ASD differ from typically developing (TD) children in terms of phenotypic features, less has been learned about if and how development in ASD differs from typical development in terms of underlying mechanisms of change. This article aims to provide a review of processes subserving lexical development in ASD, with the goal of identifying contributing factors to the heterogeneity of language outcomes in ASD.

Neural measures of social attention across the first years of life: characterizing typical development and markers of autism risk.

Few studies employing event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine infant perception/cognition have systematically characterized age-related changes over the first few years of life. Establishing a 'normative' template of development is important in its own right, and doing so may also better highlight points of divergence for high-risk populations of infants, such as those at elevated genetic risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The present investigation explores the developmental progression of the P1, N290, P400 and Nc components for a large sample of young children between 6 and 36 months of age, addressing age-related changes in amplitude, sensitivity to familiar and unfamiliar stimuli and hemispheric lateralization.

The role of early visual attention in social development.

Faces convey important information about the social environment, and even very young infants are preferentially attentive to face-like over non-face stimuli. Eye-tracking studies have allowed researchers to examine which features of faces infants find most salient across development, and the present study examined scanning of familiar (i.e.

Attachment in young children with autism spectrum disorders: an examination of separation and reunion behaviors with both mothers and fathers.

Most studies examining attachment in children with autism spectrum disorder used a strange situation paradigm and have found few significant group differences between children with autism spectrum disorder and comparisons. However, these studies predominantly used formal attachment categorizations (e.g.

Use of artificial intelligence to shorten the behavioral diagnosis of autism.

The Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R) is one of the most commonly used instruments for assisting in the behavioral diagnosis of autism. The exam consists of 93 questions that must be answered by a care provider within a focused session that often spans 2.5 hours.

Patterns of developmental trajectories in toddlers with autism spectrum disorder.

Objective: Our objective was to follow toddlers referred for risk of autism, using standardized observational measures administered frequently from age 18 months to age 36 months.

Method: Sixty-five children who were consecutive referrals and 13 children from other research projects were seen approximately every 2 months, from age 18 months to age 36 months, for standardized assessments and clinical judgments by the same examiner and every 6 months by an examiner blind to previous scores.

Results: Thirty children never received an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnosis; 48 children (all referrals) received at least 1 diagnosis of ASD.

A multisite study of the clinical diagnosis of different autism spectrum disorders.

Context: Best-estimate clinical diagnoses of specific autism spectrum disorders (autistic disorder, pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified, and Asperger syndrome) have been used as the diagnostic gold standard, even when information from standardized instruments is available.

Objective: To determine whether the relationships between behavioral phenotypes and clinical diagnoses of different autism spectrum disorders vary across 12 university-based sites.

Design: Multisite observational study collecting clinical phenotype data (diagnostic, developmental, and demographic) for genetic research.