Audiovisual Processing and Links with Language and Literacy Skills in Children with or at High Likelihood for Autism

About This Grant

PROJECT SUMMARY Autism is a highly prevalent and costly neurodevelopmental condition that is defined by differences in social communication and by the presence of restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, and activities. Autism also commonly co-occurs with developmental language disorder and reading disorder. Younger siblings of autistic children (Sibs-AUT) are known to be at high likelihood for autism, as well as for developmental language disorder, relative to younger siblings of non-autistic children (Sibs-NA). Emerging research suggests that Sibs-AUT are also at risk for reading disorder, even when they are not diagnosed with autism. However, no prospective studies to date have comprehensively evaluated the reading abilities of Sibs- AUT compared to Sibs-NA, and the predictors of future reading across Sibs-AUT and Sibs-NA are unknown. It has been proposed that differences in audiovisual speech processing (i.e., processing of the acoustic speech signal and the corresponding movements of the mouth), particularly early in life, may cascade onto the development of higher-order skills, including language and reading. This theory is intuitively appealing given that reading is inherently an audiovisual process, which necessitates matching letters (graphemes) to their associated speech sounds (phonemes) to decode words and then matching those words to their referents to comprehend the meaning of text. Recent research by the applicant has provided preliminary empirical support for this “cascading effects” theory, showing that persons with language and literacy disorder display differences in audiovisual processing and that individual differences in audiovisual speech processing explain variance in concurrent language and reading in autistic and non-autistic children at school age. The proposed study will systematically extend the applicant’s prior work to Sibs-AUT and Sibs-NA. Specifically, this predoctoral fellowship will leverage an ongoing longitudinal correlational project that is funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (a) to comprehensively characterize the reading profiles of Sibs-AUT and Sibs-NA at a pivotal point wherein children are expected to begin “reading to learn” (i.e., at a time point added to the ongoing NIDCD-funded project when children are 7-8 years of age); and (b) to test whether early multisensory development measured via event-related potentials and eyetracking between 12-18 months of age for this sample of Sibs-AUT and Sibs-NA are useful for predicting future reading in these populations, considering factors that may moderate or mediate predictive relations of interest. IMPACT AND INNOVATION: This innovative and interdisciplinary project will systematically extend the prior work of a highly promising and productive applicant to advance our understanding of the characteristics, and biobehavioral predictors, of reading in young children at high and low familial likelihood for autism. The proposed research and well-aligned training plan will lay a strong foundation for the PI’s planned program of research, solidifying her role as a leader in autism and communication sciences and disorders research.