Coordination is key: Joint attention and vocalisation in infant siblings of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Perrine Heymann, Jessie B Northrup, Kelsey L West and 3 others
PMID 30079576WHAT IT FOUND
High-risk infants later diagnosed with ASD showed less advanced joint attention, such as showing and pointing, no age-related change in vocal development, and rarely paired sounds with these behaviours.
Low-level request behaviours did not differ.
Key findings
01Infants later diagnosed with ASD produced fewer advanced joint attention behaviours, such as pointing to a distant object while making eye contact, than high-risk peers with language delay or no diagnosis.
02High-risk infants later diagnosed with ASD did not show age-related change in vocal types, while high-risk peers with language delay or no diagnosis did.
03High-risk infants later diagnosed with ASD paired sounds with initiating joint attention and low-level request behaviours less often than both other high-risk groups.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
No low-risk comparison group, so differences cannot be separated from the effect of having a sibling with ASD. The ASD group had only 9 infants, and many behaviours were rarely produced, so the estimates are unstable. Most families were Caucasian and highly educated, so results may not generalise widely. Behaviour was observed during a structured toy-play assessment, not during everyday routines. Some outcomes, such as advanced joint attention, were rarely produced by the ASD group, which limits how finely the groups can be compared.
Declared interests
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use these findings to diagnose ASD in an individual child. The groups were defined by later ADOS and language outcomes in a small high-risk sample, and the study did not test whether improving sound-action coordination changes development.