We investigated longitudinal relations among gaze following and face scanning in infancy and later language development. At 12 months, infants watched videos of a woman describing an object while their passive viewing was measured with an eye-tracker. We examined the relation between infants' face scanning behavior and their tendency to follow the speaker's attentional shift to the object she was describing. We also collected language outcome measures on the same infants at 18 and 24 months. Attention to the mouth and gaze following at 12 months both predicted later productive vocabulary. The results are discussed in terms of social engagement, which may account for both attentional distribution and language onset. We argue that an infant's inherent interest in engaging with others (in addition to creating more opportunities for communication) leads infants to attend to the most relevant information in a social scene and that this information facilitates language learning.

This study examined differences in acoustic characteristics of infant cries in a sample of babies at risk for autism and a low-risk comparison group. Cry samples derived from vocal recordings of 6-month-old infants at risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 21) and low-risk infants (n = 18) were subjected to acoustic analyses using analysis software designed for this purpose. Cries were categorized as either pain-related or non-pain-related based on videotape coding. At-risk infants produced pain-related cries with higher and more variable fundamental frequency (F0) than low-risk infants. At-risk infants later classified with ASD at 36 months had among the highest F0 values for both types of cries and produced cries that were more poorly phonated than those of nonautistic infants, reflecting cries that were less likely to be produced in a voiced mode. These results provide preliminary evidence that disruptions in cry acoustics may be part of an atypical vocal signature of autism in early life.

Little is known about arousal to socially stressful situations in children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. This preliminary study investigates physiologic arousal in children with high functioning autism (HFA, n=19) compared to a comparison group (n=11) before, during, and after the Trier Social Stress Test. The HFA group was more likely to have a decrease in salivary cortisol following the stressor, while the comparison group was more likely to have an increase (p=.02). However, there was no difference in electrodermal activity, a measure of sympathetic arousal, or vagal tone, a measure of parasympathetic activity, between groups. These findings implicate a differential neuroendocrine response to social stress in children with HFA despite similar sympathetic and parasympathetic responses during a stressor. Further studies are required to substantiate this finding.