Do Parents Recognize Autistic Deviant Behavior Long before Diagnosis? Taking into Account Interaction Using Computational Methods

BACKGROUND: To assess whether taking into account interaction synchrony would help to better differentiate autism (AD) from intellectual disability (ID) and typical development (TD) in family home movies of infants aged less than 18 months, we used computational methods. METHODOLOGY AND PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: First, we analyzed interactive sequences extracted from home movies of children with AD (N = 15), ID (N = 12), or TD (N = 15) through the Infant and Caregiver Behavior Scale (ICBS). Second, discrete behaviors between baby (BB) and Care Giver (CG) co-occurring in less than 3 seconds were selected as single interactive patterns (or dyadic events) for analysis of the two directions of interaction (CG→BB and BB→CG) by group and semester. To do so, we used a Markov assumption, a Generalized Linear Mixed Model, and non negative matrix factorization. Compared to TD children, BBs with AD exhibit a growing deviant development of interactive patterns whereas those with ID rather show an initial delay of development. Parents of AD and ID do not differ very much from parents of TD when responding to their child. However, when initiating interaction, parents use more touching and regulation up behaviors as early as the first semester. CONCLUSION: When studying interactive patterns, deviant autistic behaviors appear before 18 months. Parents seem to feel the lack of interactive initiative and responsiveness of their babies and try to increasingly supply soliciting behaviors. Thus we stress that credence should be given to parents' intuition as they recognize, long before diagnosis, the pathological process through the interactive pattern with their child

Sound Symbolism Facilitates Word Learning in 14-Month-Olds

Sound symbolism, or the nonarbitrary link between linguistic sound and meaning, has often been discussed in connection with language evolution, where the oral imitation of external events links phonetic forms with their referents (e.g., Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). In this research, we explore whether sound symbolism may also facilitate synchronic language learning in human infants. Sound symbolism may be a useful cue particularly at the earliest developmental stages of word learning, because it potentially provides a way of bootstrapping word meaning from perceptual information. Using an associative word learning paradigm, we demonstrated that 14-month-old infants could detect Köhler-type (1947) shape-sound symbolism, and could use this sensitivity in their effort to establish a wordreferent association

Sonocatalysis: a potential sustainable pathway for the valorization of lignocellulosic biomass and derivatives

International audienc

Infants’ Preference for Native Audiovisual Speech Dissociated from Congruency Preference

Although infant speech perception in often studied in isolated modalities, infants' experience with speech is largely multimodal (i.e., speech sounds they hear are accompanied by articulating faces). Across two experiments, we tested infants' sensitivity to the relationship between the auditory and visual components of audiovisual speech in their native (English) and non-native (Spanish) language. In Experiment 1, infants' looking times were measured during a preferential looking task in which they saw two simultaneous visual speech streams articulating a story, one in English and the other in Spanish, while they heard either the English or the Spanish version of the story. In Experiment 2, looking times from another group of infants were measured as they watched single displays of congruent and incongruent combinations of English and Spanish audio and visual speech streams. Findings demonstrated an age-related increase in looking towards the native relative to non-native visual speech stream when accompanied by the corresponding (native) auditory speech. This increase in native language preference did not appear to be driven by a difference in preference for native vs. non-native audiovisual congruence as we observed no difference in looking times at the audiovisual streams in Experiment 2