Examining precursors to language impairment in ASD via remote assessment

Project Summary/Abstract Roughly 30% of autistic individuals remain minimally verbal as adults, often despite significant intervention. This is due, in part, to our limited understanding of the mechanisms underlying language development in autistic children. This gap in our knowledge is attributable to the developmental gap between the onset of language development in infancy and the diagnosis of autism in late toddlerhood. To better understand early development in autism, researchers often study infant-siblings of diagnosed children as the rate of diagnosis in this population is roughly 20%. To draw meaningful conclusions about a population as heterogeneous as autistic children, large samples are required. To date, the need for in-person assessments has made it challenging to collect the requisite sample to understand how language develops in infants who go on to develop autism. This R21 proposal takes the first steps to overcoming these challenges and moving closer to the NIDCD Strategic Goal of identifying and developing interventions targeted to specific populations. To do this, we will leverage recent advances in the remote administration of looking time tasks for infants and automated coding of infant looking behaviors. Our group recently established the feasibility of remote assessment of cognitive development using a scalable battery of remote tasks and computer vision software to reliably identify gaze direction in response to these tasks administered on home computers. Here we extend this work to test three posited mechanisms of language impairment in autism: (1) Atypical Speech Perception; (2) Audiovisual Synchrony Processing, and (3) Prediction. This project will identify robust tasks for assessing these skills remotely and pilot this approach in infant siblings of autistic children. With the information gained from this study, we will assess the relative contribution of these mechanisms for language development in autism, thereby improving our capacity to design targeted interventions that can improve quality of life for autistic children and their families.