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Broad-scale neuroscientific investigations of diverse human populations are difficult to implement. This is because the primary neuroimaging methods (magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography [EEG]) historically have not been portable, and participants may be unable or unwilling to travel to test sites. Miniaturization of EEG technologies has now opened the door to neuroscientific fieldwork, allowing for easier access to under-represented populations. Recent efforts to conduct auditory neuroscience outside a laboratory setting are reviewed and then an in-home technique for recording auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) and frequency-following responses (FFRs) in a home setting is introduced. As a proof of concept, we have conducted two in-home electrophysiological studies: one in 27 children aged 6 to 16 years (13 with autism spectrum disorder) and another in 12 young adults aged 18 to 27 years, using portable electrophysiological equipment to record ABRs and FFRs to click and speech stimuli, spanning rural and urban and multiple homes and testers. We validate our fieldwork approach by presenting waveforms and data on latencies and signal-to-noise ratio. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility and utility of home-based ABR/FFR techniques, paving the course for larger fieldwork investigations of populations that are difficult to test or recruit. We conclude this tutorial with practical tips and guidelines for recording ABRs and FFRs in the field and discuss possible clinical and research applications of this approach.

BACKGROUND: Language development is a highly interactive activity. However, most research on linguistic environment has focused on the quantity and complexity of linguistic input to children, with current models showing that complexity facilitates language in both typically developing (TD) and autistic children.AIMS: After reviewing existing work on caregiver engagement of children's utterances, we aim to operationalize such engagement with automated measures of linguistic alignment, thereby providing scalable tools to assess caregivers' active reuse of their children's language. By assessing the presence of alignment, its sensitivity to the child's individual differences and how well it predicts language development beyond current models across the two groups, we showcase the usefulness of the approach and provide initial empirical foundations for further conceptual and empirical investigations.METHODS: We measure lexical, syntactic and semantic types of caregiver alignment in a longitudinal corpus involving 32 adult-autistic child and 35 adult-TD child dyads, with children between 2 and 5 years of age. We assess the extent to which caregivers repeat their children's words, syntax, and semantics, and whether these repetitions predict language development beyond more standard predictors.RESULTS: Caregivers tend to re-use their child's language in a way that is related to the child's individual, primarily linguistic, differences. Caregivers' alignment provides unique information improving our ability to predict future language development in both typical and autistic children.CONCLUSIONS: We provide evidence that language development also relies on interactive conversational processes, previously understudied. We share carefully detailed methods, and open-source scripts so as to systematically extend our approach to new contexts and languages.

Introduction: The role of linguistic repetition in child language is complicated. Echolalia, the persistent repetition of one’s interlocutor’s utterances, has long been associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The literature on echolalia suggests that children with ASD often re-use fragments of language without any communicative or language-learning purpose. At the same time, research on linguistic repetition in typically developing (TD) children and adults increasingly demonstrates that linguistic repetition is an important social activity that helps create shared engagement, common ground and even scaffolds language acquisition. Depending on which literature is consulted, children with ASD, who often have social challenges, might be expected to repeat more or less than typically developing children. Objective: We take a systematic and nuanced approach to linguistic repetition in children with and without ASD: we distinguished exact repetition, rate, and level, as well as lexical, syntactic, and semantic repetition in a large, quasi-naturalistic corpus. We hypothesize that more rigid forms of repetition (exact lexical repetitions) would be more frequent in ASD, and negatively related to individual differences in linguistic, cognitive, and social skills. We hypothesize that more potentially productive forms of repetitions (alignment rate, semantic alignment) would be less frequent in ASD and positively related to the same individual differences.Methods: We analyzed spontaneous speech in 67 parent-child dyads from a longitudinal corpus (30 minutes of play activities at 6 visits over 2 years). We included 32 children diagnosed with ASD and 35 linguistically matched TD children (mean age at recruitment respectively 32.76 and 20.27 months). Alignment was calculated using the ALIGN Python library (Duran et al., 2019). We first contrasted child alignment in actual conversations with that in surrogate pairs formed by a parent and a child from two different dyads. We used Bayesian multilevel zero-and-one-inflated beta regression models. This accounts for the propensity of children to align at all (rate), the proportion of the caregiver’s utterance repeated when the children do align (level), and exact repetitions, as a function of diagnostic group and visit. Lexical repetitions were regressed out from syntactic and semantic repetitions to minimize confounds. Analyses of individual differences include Mullen Expressive Language and Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) as proxies for linguistic skills, Visual Reception for non-linguistic cognitive skill; and Vineland Socialization for socialization skills. Results: We found a small number of exact repetitions in both groups (roughly 1% of utterances across visits); moreover, children with ASD increased their use of repetitions over time while the TD group decreased theirs (at final visit, 1.2% in ASD vs. 0.7% in TD). Partial repetitions were much more frequent: children reused caregivers’ words at high rates regardless of diagnostic group (24% of utterances at first visit). Partial repetitions of words increased in frequency (but not level) over time, and did so faster for TD children (at final visit: 33% for ASD and 40% for TD); and the same happened for partial repetition of syntax (from approximately 20% of utterances in both groups at first visit to 23% for ASD and 43% for TD at last visit) and semantic alignment (from 0.34 semantic similarity at first visit to 0.37 for ASD and 0.44 for TD at last visit). Further, children with richer linguistic abilities also displayed a higher tendency to partially re-use their caregivers’ language (alignment rates and semantic alignment).Discussion: Children with and without ASD commonly re-used the words, syntax, and topics of their caregivers. Furthermore, most repetition was at least potentially productive, with repeated language being re-contextualized and integrated with non-repeated language. Interestingly, children with ASD developed this skill at a slower rate than TD children, contrary to previous findings using less fine-grained methods. Only individual differences in linguistic skills positively related to flexible forms of alignment, further supporting their productive nature. The salience of echolalia in ASD might be partially explained by slight differences in frequency, amplified by lower semantic alignment, persistence over time, and expectations of echolalia. However, more in-depth qualitative and quantitative analyses of how repetitions are used and received in context are needed.

BACKGROUND: Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) demonstrate social and communication impairments from an early age. While researchers have long investigated parenting behaviors in relation to children’s social and communication development, fewer studies have examined the relevance of movement-based parenting behaviors to facilitating communication and social engagement with young children. The present study aimed to investigate: (1) parent-guided movements (PGMs) within dyads of parents and typically developing (TD) children and children with ASD; and (2) children’s ASD diagnostic and receptive language scores as predictors of PGM frequency. METHOD: Video-recorded play interactions of 33 TD dyads (mean age: 20.4 months) and 31 dyads with ASD (mean age: 32.6 months) were matched on child’s expressive language. Data were obtained from a longitudinal study on developmental language trajectories in ASD and coded for PGMs. RESULTS: Overall, parents of children with ASD initiated PGMs more frequently than parents of TD children during play (U = 269.00, z = − 3.58, p < 0.001). PGM frequency was predicted by children’s ADOS scores (X(2) = 5.46, p = 0.02, OR = 1.26, 95% CI [1.04, 1.54]) and receptive language (X(2) = 4.15, p = 0.04, OR = 5.43, 95% CI [1.10, 27.67]). CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that parents of children with ASD and low receptive language may utilize more movement-based strategies to compensate for their children’s impaired social engagement and verbal comprehension. This study offers insight on a particular movement-based modality characterizing ASD dyads that can be used as a measure in parent-mediated interventions.

This longitudinal study examined the degree to which standardized measures of language and natural language samples predicted later language usage in a heterogeneous sample of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and how this relationship is impacted by ASD severity and interventions. Participants with a diagnosis of ASD (N = 54, 41 males) completed standardized assessments of language and social functioning; natural language samples were transcribed from play-based interactions. Findings indicated that standardized language measures, natural language measures, and ADOS severity were each unique predictors of later lexical use. Intervention types also appeared to impact later language; in particular, participation in mainstream inclusion accounted for significant amounts of variance in children's mean length of utterance at T3.

Background: Language development is a highly interactive activity. However, most research on linguistic environment has focused on quantity and complexity of linguistic input to children, with current models showing that complexity facilitates language in both TD children and autistic children.Aims: We investigate the presence and sensitivity of caregivers’ active reuse of their children’s language (linguistic alignment), and how well it predicts language development beyond other measures of linguistic input, taking also into account the child’s cognitive, social and linguistic abilities.Methods: We measure lexical, syntactic and semantic types of caregiver alignment in a longitudinal corpus involving 32 adult-autistic child and 35 adult-TD child dyads, with children between 2 and 5 years of age. We assess the extent to which caregivers repeat their children’s word, syntax and semantics, and whether this predicts language development beyond more standard predictors. Results: Caregivers tend to re-use their child’s language in a way that is related to the child’s individual, primarily linguistic differences. Caregivers’ alignment provides unique information improving our ability to predict future language development in both typical and autistic children. Conclusions: We provide evidence that language acquisition also relies on interactive conversational processes, previously understudied. We share open-source scripts to systematically extend our approach to new contexts and languages.

Young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) present with a broad range of spoken language abilities, as well as delays in precursor skills such as gesture production and joint attention skills. While standardized assessments describe language strengths, the Communication and Symbolic Behavior Scales (CSBS-DP) is a particularly robust measure as it additionally characterizes precise aspects of social communication. This study provides a unique contribution by assessing the interactional effects of CSBS-DP Social Composite performance with early language samples on later language outcomes. Our results indicate that multiple social communication elements significantly interact with early spoken language to predict later language. Our findings also highlight the transactional relationship between early spoken vocabulary and social communication skills that bolster language development growth.

Background: Parent language is a crucial factor in language acquisition in children with ASD and TD children alike, but its role as a scaffold for the child’s linguistic production on a turn by turn basis is under-investigated. Here we focus on interactive alignment, that is, the tendency to re-use the child’s lexical (“mommy, give me the giraffe”, “is that a giraffe?”), syntactic (“the giraffe has fallen”, “yes and the elephant has gone down to help her”) and semantic (topic maintenance) choices. Besides supporting common ground and rapport, interactive alignment might facilitate language development by providing a rewarding parental response to children’s productions, as well as contextualized linguistic input via elaboration.Objectives: We investigate whether i) parental alignment to their children might affect language development beyond more traditional measures of parental input (total and unique words, Mean Length of Utterance, or MLU), and ii) this is modulated by the cognitive and clinical features of the children. Methods: We analyzed spontaneous speech in 67 parent-child dyads from a longitudinal corpus (6 visits over 2 years), consisting of 30 minutes of play activities. We included 32 children diagnosed with ASD (mean age at recruitment: 32.76m) and 35 linguistically matched TD children (mean age at recruitment: 20.27m). Lexical alignment was based on lemmatized words, syntactic alignment on 2-grams of part-of-speech-tags, and semantic alignment on Word2Vec representations of the corpus (Duran et al 2019). Alignment was calculated as cosine similarity between successive conversational turns (parent following child). To assess the effects of alignment at visit N on language learning at visit N+1, we relied on the best multilevel Poisson (total and unique words) and loglinear (MLU) models from our previous study on the role of parental input (Fusaroli et al 2019), and evaluated by Leave-One-Out-Information-Criteria whether including parental alignment improved these models.Results: The full findings are presented in the accompanying table. The child’s later MLU, unique and total words were positively affected by lexical and syntactic alignment. Parents' semantic alignment positively affected total amount of words, but negatively the number of unique words. Further, the effects of alignment were modulated by the children’s features, in that children with lower previous production showed stronger effects of parental alignment on their own word use, compared with children with higher scores. Diagnosis provided independent modulation, in that children with ASD showed weaker effects on their own word use of parental lexical alignment, but stronger effects of syntactic alignment, than TD children. Finally, regardless of diagnosis, children exposed to less complex parental input (lower MLU) seemed to be more affected by the levels of parental lexical and syntactic alignment in their future word use, than those exposed to higher MLU.Conclusions: Parental alignment differentially affected child language development. Parental lexical and syntactic alignment had positive effects on children’s word types, tokens, and MLU; however, child features only modulated word use. Specifically, children with poorer production and less complex linguistic input benefited more from parental alignment of their own speech, and children with ASD in particular benefited from higher syntactic alignment.

Background: Conversational turn-taking provides a scaffold that helps children learn the elements and rules of language (Dale & Spivey 2006, Yurofsky et al 2016). This relies heavily on social feedback and engagement (Fusaroli et al 2014), and thus conversations involving children with ASD are expected to show different turn-taking dynamics than conversations involving typically-developing (TD) children. These dynamics remain relatively unexplored. Objectives: Our goal was to explore the turn-taking dynamics between caregivers and children with ASD. More specifically we asked: what significant differences can be observed in the number, duration, and time between conversational contributions by adult caregivers and children in dyads with ASD and TD children?Methods: We investigated spontaneous speech in caregiver-child dyads from a longitudinal corpus (6 visits over 2 years), consisting of 30 minutes of controlled playful activities between caregivers and 67 children: 35 with ASD (MA = 33 months) and 32 initially-language-matched typically developing (TD; MA = 20 months, cf. Goodwin et al. 2012). Time-coded transcripts were used to calculate utterance duration in seconds, interturn latency (seconds between utterances), and number, and timing of each interlocutor’s utterances. Mixed effects models were employed to assess the relation between diagnosis and these measures, separately in children and caregivers, controlling for participant ID, time within conversation, and visit.Results: While there was no main effect of diagnosis, the conversations displayed interactions between diagnosis and time. TD children increased their turn duration over the course of a conversation more than children with ASD (Beta=-0.05, SE=0.02, p=0.003), and this difference increased in later visits (Beta=0.01, SE-0.01, SE

A consensus has emerged that despite common core features, autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has multiple etiologies and various genetic and biological characteristics. The fact that there are likely to be subtypes of ASD has complicated attempts to develop effective therapies. The UC Davis MIND Institute Autism Phenome Project is a longitudinal, multidisciplinary analysis of children with autism and age-matched typically developing controls; nearly 400 families are participating in this study. The overarching goal is to gather sufficient biological, medical, and behavioral data to allow definition of clinically meaningful subtypes of ASD. One reasonable hypothesis is that different subtypes of autism will demonstrate different patterns of altered brain organization or development i.e., different neurophenotypes. In this Commentary, we discuss one neurophenotype that is defined by megalencephaly, or having brain size that is large and disproportionate to body size. We have found that 15% of the boys with autism demonstrate this neurophenotype, though it is far less common in girls. We review behavioral and medical characteristics of the large-brained group of boys with autism in comparison to those with typically sized brains. While brain size in typically developing individuals is positively correlated with cognitive function, the children with autism and larger brains have more severe disabilities and poorer prognosis. This research indicates that phenotyping in autism, like genotyping, requires a very substantial cohort of subjects. Moreover, since brain and behavior relationships may emerge at different times during development, this effort highlights the need for longitudinal analyses to carry out meaningful phenotyping. Autism Res 2017, 10: 711-722. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Although autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are generally considered lifelong disabilities, literature suggests that a minority of individuals with an ASD will lose the diagnosis. However, the existence of this phenomenon, as well as its frequency and interpretation, is still controversial: were they misdiagnosed initially, is this a rare event, did they lose the full diagnosis, but still suffer significant social and communication impairments or did they lose all symptoms of ASD and function socially within the normal range?The present study documents a group of these optimal outcome individuals (OO group, n=34) by comparing their functioning on standardized measures to age, sex, and nonverbal IQ matched individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA group, n=44) or typical development (TD group, n=34). For this study, 'optimal outcome' requires losing all symptoms of ASD in addition to the diagnosis, and functioning within the nonautistic range of social interaction and communication. Domains explored include language, face recognition, socialization, communication, and autism symptoms.Optimal outcome and TD groups' mean scores did not differ on socialization, communication, face recognition, or most language subscales, although three OO individuals showed below-average scores on face recognition. Early in their development, the OO group displayed milder symptoms than the HFA group in the social domain, but had equally severe difficulties with communication and repetitive behaviors.Although possible deficits in more subtle aspects of social interaction or cognition are not ruled out, the results substantiate the possibility of OO from autism spectrum disorders and demonstrate an overall level of functioning within normal limits for this group.