A new language-skills study that included infants later diagnosed with autism suggests that all children can benefit from exposure to more speech from their parents/ caregivers.
Dr. Meghan Swanson, assistant professor and director of the Infant Neurodevelopment & Language Research Lab at The University of Texas at Dallas, is the corresponding author of the study, published online June 28 in Autism Research. They reported as the first to extend research about the relationship between caregiver speech and infant language development from typically developing children to those with autism.
Early intervention, from birth to age 3, has shown to be effective at supporting development in various cohorts of children,” said Swanson. There has been a push to identify autism earlier or demonstrate that the same techniques that help most children develop language skills also benefit those eventually diagnosed with autism.
The study involved 96 babies, 60 of whom had an older sibling with autism. Swanson said that this “baby-sibling” research design was necessary as “autism tends to run in families. These younger siblings have about a 20% chance of being diagnosed eventually with autism.” Indeed, 14 children from the high-risk subset of 60 were diagnosed with autism at 24 months.