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How do children allocate their attention? There is too much information in the world to encode it all, so children must pick and choose. How do they organize their sampling to make the most of the learning opportunities that surround them? Previous work shows infants actively seek intermediately predictable information. Here we employ eye-tracking and computational modeling to examine the impact of stimulus predictability across early childhood (ages 3-6 years, n = 72, predominantly Non-Hispanic White, middle- to upper-middle-income), by chronological age and cognitive ability. Results indicated that children prefer attending to stimuli of intermediate predictability, with no differences in this pattern based on age or cognitive ability. The consistency may suggest a robust general information-processing mechanism that operates across the lifespan.

Social partners tend to coordinate their behaviors in time. This "interactional synchrony" is associated with a host of positive social outcomes, making it ripe for study in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Twenty children with ASD and 17 typically developing (TD) children participated in conversations with familiar and unfamiliar adults. Conversations were rated for movement synchrony and verbal synchrony, and mothers completed measures regarding children's everyday social and communication skills. Children with ASD exhibited less interactional synchrony, with familiar and unfamiliar partners, than TD peers. Beyond group-level differences, interactional synchrony negatively correlated with autism symptom severity, and predicted dimensional scores on established social and communication measures. Results suggest that disrupted interactional synchrony may be associated with impaired social functioning in ASD.

This study examined the impact of noise on cognitive performance in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), while concurrently measuring sympathetic responses. Adolescents with and without ASD completed visually presented span tasks in a 2 × 2 experimental manipulation of noise (quiet vs. 75 dB gated broadband noise) and task difficulty (easier vs. harder). Analyses revealed a significant noise × difficulty interaction on performance, and a significant group × noise × difficulty interaction on sympathetic arousal. Correlational analyses indicated an adaptive effect of noise and increased arousal on performance in the easier condition for the control group and a detrimental effect of noise and increased arousal in the harder condition for the ASD group. Implications for sensory processing research and intervention development are discussed.

This study examined iconic gesture comprehension in autism, with the goal of assessing whether cross-modal processing difficulties impede speech-and-gesture integration. Participants were 19 adolescents with high functioning autism (HFA) and 20 typical controls matched on age, gender, verbal IQ, and socio-economic status (SES). Gesture comprehension was assessed via quantitative analyses of visual fixations during a video-based task, using the visual world paradigm. Participants' eye movements were recorded while they watched videos of a person describing one of four shapes shown on a computer screen, using speech-and-gesture or speech-only descriptions. Participants clicked on the shape that the speaker described. Since gesture naturally precedes speech, earlier visual fixations to the target shape during speech-and-gesture compared to speech-only trials, would suggest immediate integration of auditory and visual information. Analyses of eye movements supported this pattern in control participants but not in individuals with autism: iconic gestures facilitated comprehension in typical individuals, while it hindered comprehension in those with autism. Cross-modal processing difficulties in autism were not accounted for by impaired unimodal speech or gesture processing. The results have important implications for the treatment of children and adults with this disorder. (Contains 3 figures and 3 tables.)

Background: Adults with intellectual disability (ID) have several risk factors for osteoporosis. Feeding problems with consequent nutritive deficiencies, and lack of sunshine exposure may lead to vitamin D deficiency. The purpose of this study was to evaluate vitamin D status in adults with ID living in nursing homes and to compare two different means to administer vitamin D in adults with ID. Methods: The study included 138 adults (95 males and 43 females) with ID living in nursing homes of Paajarvi Inter-Municipal Association. Clinical data on the etiology and severity of ID, other illnesses, medications, anthropometry and fractures during the preceding 5 years were collected from medical records. The participants were alternately allocated to receive vitamin D3 either per orally 800 IU daily for 6 months (PO group, n = 72) or as a single intramuscular injection of 150 000 IU (IM group, n = 66). Blood samples were obtained at baseline and at 6 months for parameters of calcium homeostasis, including serum concentrations of 25-hydroxyvitamin D (S-25-OHD) and parathyroid hormone (P-PTH). Results: At baseline, the mean S-25-OHD was low, 40 nmol/L in the PO group and 41 nmol/L in the IM group. The low vitamin D levels were associated with secondary hyperparathyroidism in 17%. At 6 months the mean S-25-OHD was 82 nmol/L in the PO group (P less than 0.001 for the difference from baseline) and 62 nmol/L in the IM group (P less than 0.001). P-PTH decreased in both groups: from 51 ng/L to 33 ng/L in the PO group (P less than 0.001) and from 54 ng/L to 34 ng/L in the IM group (P less than 0.001). With daily dosing (800 IU/day) the recommended level (greater than 80 nmol/L) was attained in 42%, but with intramuscular dose only in 12%. S-25-OHD was greater than 100 nmol/L in 14 participants in the PO group and in one participant in the IM group; these high values were associated with hypercalcemia in two and hyperphosphatemia in six participants. Participants with S-25-OHD greater than 100 nmol/L at 6 months were lighter (51.9 kg vs. 67.5 kg, P = 0.002) and had smaller body mass index than participants with lower S-25-OHD (20.5 kg/m[superscript 2] and 24.4 kg/m[superscript 2], P = 0.017). Conclusions: Vitamin D insufficiency was common in adults with ID living in nursing homes. Both oral and intramuscular administrations of vitamin D3 improved vitamin D status without adverse effects. The treatment response at 6 months was better in the PO group. High-dose intramuscular vitamin D3 injections may be a convenient way to maintain sufficient vitamin D status in adults with ID but further studies are needed to establish the optimal dose and interval as well as subsequent potential health benefits in these patients. Based on this study, vitamin D supplementation with per oral 800 IU/day is recommended to all adults with ID living in nursing homes.

Language in autism has been the subject of intense interest, because communication deficits are central to the disorder, and because autism serves as an arena for testing theories of language acquisition. High-functioning older children with autism are often considered to have intact grammatical abilities, despite pragmatic impairments. Given the heterogeneity in language skills at younger ages, this assumption merits further investigation. Participants with autism (n = 21, aged nine to seventeen years), matched on chronological age, receptive vocabulary and IQ, to 22 typically developing individuals, completed a grammaticality judgment task. Participants with autism were significantly less sensitive than controls, specifically for third person singular and present progressive marking. Performance interacted with sentence length, with lower sensitivity to errors occurring at the end of the longest stimulus sentences. Performance sensitivity was associated with onset of single word and phrase speech, and with severity of autistic symptomatology. Implications of findings are discussed.

This paper examined the fundamental frequency variation in the narratives of individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA) and typical controls matched on age, IQ, and verbal abilities. Study 1 found increased fundamental frequency variation in the speech of 21 children and adolescents with HFA when compared to 21 typical controls. Study 2 replicated the findings from Study 1 with a younger sample of 17 children with HFA and 17 typical controls. In addition, Study 1 found evidence that acoustic measurements of prosody were related to clinical judgments of autism-specific communication impairments, although this was not replicated in Study 2. Taken together, these studies provide evidence for differences in expressive prosody in individuals with HFA that can be measured objectively.

We examine the referential choices (pronouns/zeros vs. names/descriptions) made during a narrative by high-functioning children and adolescents with autism and a well-matched typically developing control group. The process of choosing appropriate referring expressions has been proposed to depend on two areas of cognitive functioning: (a) judging the attention and knowledge of one's interlocutor, and (b) the use of memory and attention mechanisms to represent the discourse situation. We predicted possible group differences, since autism is often associated with deficits in (a) mentalizing and (b) memory and attention, as well as a more general tendency to have difficulty with the pragmatic aspects of language use. Results revealed that some of the participants with autism were significantly less likely to produce pronouns or zeros in some discourse contexts. However, the difference was only one of degree. Overall, all participants in our analysis exhibited fine-grained sensitivity to the discourse context. Furthermore, referential choices for all participants were modulated by factors related to the cognitive effort of language production. (Contains 8 tables and 3 figures.)

Individuals with autism exhibit significant impairments in prosody production, yet there is a paucity of research on prosody comprehension in this population. The current study adapted a psycholinguistic paradigm to examine whether individuals with autism are able to use prosody to resolve syntactically ambiguous sentences. Participants were 21 adolescents with high-functioning autism (HFA), and 22 typically developing controls matched on age, IQ, receptive language, and gender. The HFA group was significantly less likely to use prosody to disambiguate syntax, but scored comparably to controls when syntax alone or both prosody and syntax indicated the correct response. These findings indicate that adolescents with HFA have difficulty using prosody to disambiguate syntax in comparison to typically developing controls, even when matched on chronological age, IQ, and receptive language. The implications of these findings for how individuals with autism process language are discussed. (Contains 3 figures and 1 table.)

Background: During speech perception, the ability to integrate auditory and visual information causes speech to sound louder and be more intelligible, and leads to quicker processing. This integration is important in early language development, and also continues to affect speech comprehension throughout the lifespan. Previous research shows that individuals with autism have difficulty integrating information, especially across multiple sensory domains. Methods: In the present study, audiovisual speech integration was investigated in 18 adolescents with high-functioning autism and 19 well-matched adolescents with typical development using a speech in noise paradigm. Speech reception thresholds were calculated for auditory only and audiovisual matched speech, and lipreading ability was measured. Results: Compared to individuals with typical development, individuals with autism showed less benefit from the addition of visual information in audiovisual speech perception. We also found that individuals with autism were significantly worse than those in the comparison group at lipreading. Hierarchical regression demonstrated that group differences in the audiovisual condition, while influenced by auditory perception and especially by lipreading, were also attributable to a unique factor, which may reflect a specific deficit in audiovisual integration. Conclusions: Combined deficits in audiovisual speech integration and lipreading in individuals with autism are likely to contribute to ongoing difficulties in speech comprehension, and may also be related to delays in early language development.

Language acquisition research in autism has traditionally focused on high-level pragmatic deficits. Few studies have examined grammatical abilities in autism, with mixed findings. The present study addresses this gap in the literature by providing a detailed investigation of syntactic and higher-level discourse abilities in verbal children with autism, age 5 years. Findings indicate clear language difficulties that go beyond what would be expected based on developmental level; specifically, syntactic delays, impairments in discourse management and increased production of non-meaningful words (jargon). The present study indicates a highly specific pattern of language impairments, and importantly, syntactic delays, in a group of children with autism carefully matched on lexical level and non-verbal mental age with children with developmental delays and typical development.

Previous research demonstrates an uneven pattern of cognitive abilities in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). This study examined whether this uneven pattern exists within the nonverbal domain in young children. We hypothesized relative strengths in perceptual abilities and weaknesses in nonverbal conceptual abilities in preschoolers with ASDs compared to groups with non-autism developmental delays and typical development. Profiles were examined using the Leiter International Performance Scale-Revised. The ASD group displayed clear relative strengths in visuospatial disembedding and detail-focused processing, with relative weaknesses in abstraction and concept formation. This contrasted with patterns of roughly equivalent abilities in both comparison groups. These findings have implications for subsequent development and may represent key features of the cognitive profile of autism.

Previous research has found few quantitative differences between children with high-functioning autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) and well-matched controls in the length, complexity, and structure of their narratives. Researchers have noted, however, that narratives of children with ASDs have an unusual and idiosyncratic nature. This study provides an analysis of narratives in 17 children with high-functioning ASDs and 17 typically developing children matched on age, gender, language abilities, and cognitive abilities. We examined story recall and narrative coherence. The study revealed no group differences in story length or syntactic complexity. Children with ASDs also did not differ from controls in their use of the gist of a story to aid recall, or in their sensitivity to the importance of story events. Children with ASDs did, however, produce narratives that were significantly less coherent than the narratives of controls. Children with ASDs appeared less likely to use the gist of the story to organize their narratives coherently. These findings are discussed with regard to their relationship to other cognitive and linguistic difficulties of children with ASDs.

Purpose: Pragmatic language disorders (PLDs) are difficult to diagnose in a cost-effective manner, and there are few assessment tools that yield quantitative data. This investigation was designed to determine whether two formal assessment tools would differentiate PLDs in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) from controls matched on verbal IQ and language fundamentals. Method: Thirty-four matched participants were given the "Test of Pragmatic Language" ("TOPL"; D. Phelps-Terasaki & T. Phelps-Gunn, 1992) and the "Strong Narrative Assessment Procedure" ("SNAP"; C. J. Strong, 1998). Results: Participants with ASDs had significantly poorer scores than controls on the "TOPL." On the "SNAP," the children with ASDs performed similarly to controls on syntax, cohesion, story grammar, and completeness of episodes. The controls performed significantly better only on the ability to answer inferential questions. Clinical Implications: The "TOPL" was effective in differentiating PLDs in children with ASDs when performance was compared to matched controls. The "SNAP" did not clearly differentiate language problems in these two groups. Research is needed to develop formal assessment tools that target the unique language disabilities of high-functioning individuals with ASDs.

Background Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) have been shown to have multisensory integration deficits, which may lead to problems perceiving complex, multisensory environments. For example, understanding audiovisual speech requires integration of visual information from the lips and face with auditory information from the voice, and audiovisual speech integration deficits can lead to impaired understanding and comprehension. While there is strong evidence for an audiovisual speech integration impairment in ASD, it is unclear whether this impairment is due to low level perceptual processes that affect all types of audiovisual integration or if it is specific to speech processing. Method Here, we measure audiovisual integration of basic speech (i.e., consonant-vowel utterances) and object stimuli (i.e., a bouncing ball) in adolescents with ASD and well-matched controls. We calculate a temporal window of integration (TWI) using each individual’s ability to identify which of two videos (one temporally aligned and one misaligned) matches auditory stimuli. The TWI measures tolerance for temporal asynchrony between the auditory and visual streams, and is an important feature of audiovisual perception. Results While controls showed similar tolerance of asynchrony for the simple speech and object stimuli, individuals with ASD did not. Specifically, individuals with ASD showed less tolerance of asynchrony for speech stimuli compared to object stimuli. In individuals with ASD, decreased tolerance for asynchrony in speech stimuli was associated with higher ratings of autism symptom severity. Conclusions These results suggest that audiovisual perception in ASD may vary for speech and object stimuli beyond what can be accounted for by stimulus complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]