Visual Traces of Language Acquisition in Toddlers with Autism Spectrum Disorder During the Second Year of Life

Mechanisms by Which Early Eye Gaze to the Mouth During Multisensory Speech Influences Expressive Communication Development in Infant Siblings of Children with and Without Autism

“…Mediation analyses indicated that looking to the mouth influences expressive communication indirectly through its associations with supported joint engagement, specifically HSJE, and child prelinguistic vocal complexity. Although a direct link between looking to the mouth on concurrent expressive communication has been observed in several prior studies of children with autism (e.g., Chawarska et al, 2012;Habayeb et al, 2020;Klin et al, 2002;Norbury et al, 2009) and longitudinally in infants at increased likelihood for autism (e.g., Chawarska et al, 2012Chawarska et al, , 2013Shic et al, 2014), it is notable that this indirect effect was "complete" in our study, meaning that the direct link between these variables was nonsignificant when controlling for HSJE and prelinguistic vocal complexity. In addition, this indirect effect did not vary according to sibling group.…”

“…There is increasing empirical support for the hypothesis that looking at the mouth during audiovisual speech bootstraps expressive communication development in individuals with autism. Several studies, for example, have demonstrated an association between looking at the mouth of a talker and aspects of language development and/or broader communicative competence in children and adults with autism both concurrently (e.g., Chawarska, Macari, & Shic, 2012;Habayeb et al, 2020;Klin, Jones, Schultz, Volkmar, & Cohen, 2002;Norbury et al, 2009) and prospectively (e.g., . The mechanisms by which looking to the mouth may scaffold expressive communication development in autism, however, remain unclear.…”

Facial speech processing in children with and without dyslexia

“…In the course of early development, children change in the way they spontaneously look at talking human faces as a function of language development (de Boisferon et al, 2018;Lewkowicz & Hansen-Tift, 2012). At the same time, increased and over-reliant attention on the mouth, beyond the period of early language acquisition, has been associated with atypical communication development that hallmarks disorders like autism and language impairment (Åsberg Johnels et al, 2014;Falck-Ytter et al, 2010;Habayeb et al, 2020;Hosozawa et al, 2012). Such insights have been made possible using eye tracking technology, and here we adopted this straightforward method to examine possible facial speech processing alterations in developmental dyslexia, an area of research characterized by mixed findings.…”

Factors Associated with Receptive and Expressive Language in Autistic Children and Siblings: A systematic review

“…Another study found that looking at the mouth over looking at the eyes was signi cantly and positively related to expressive language in 20-month-old autistic children who had already acquired rst words, but not for autistic children who had not yet acquired speech at the same age, or neurotypical children [71].…”

“…22 of the 54 included articles compared the language abilities of autistic children or EL-siblings with a neurotypical control group. Most of these articles (n = 17 (77%)) showed that autistic children and ELsiblings scored signi cantly lower on at least one of the employed language measures: one investigation showed lower general language abilities for EL-siblings without distinguishing between receptive and expressive language [65], two articles showed lower scores for EL-siblings only for receptive language [66, 67], three articles revealed lower scores for autistic children or EL-siblings only for expressive language [33, 68, 69] and 11 articles observed both lower receptive and expressive language abilities for autistic children or EL-siblings [34,54,55,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77]. The remaining ve articles did not identify group differences [35,56,78,79,80].…”