A Social Feedback Loop for Speech Development and Its Reduction in Autism

Abstract

We analyze the microstructure of child-adult interaction during naturalistic, daylong, automatically labeled audio recordings (13,836 hours total) of children (8- to 48-month-olds) with and without autism. We find that adult responses are more likely when child vocalizations are speech-related. In turn, a child vocalization is more likely to be speech-related if the previous speech-related child vocalization received an immediate adult response. Taken together, these results are consistent with the idea that there is a social feedback loop between child and caregiver that promotes speech-language development. Although this feedback loop applies in both typical development and autism, children with autism produce proportionally fewer speech-related vocalizations and the responses they receive are less contingent on whether their vocalizations are speech-related. We argue that such differences will diminish the strength of the social feedback loop with cascading effects on speech development over time. Differences related to socioeconomic status are also reported.

Vocalization Rate and Consonant Production in Toddlers at High and Low Risk for Autism

“…In ASD, lower speechlike vocalization rate may be closely associated with reductions in some types of communicative acts (Shumway & Wetherby, 2009;Wetherby, Prizant, & Hutchinson, 1998;Wetherby, Watt, Morgan, & Shumway, 2007). In contrast with some previous studies Schoen et al, 2011;Plumb & Wetherby, 2013;Warlaumont et al, 2014), the HRA+ toddlers in our study did not also have a higher rate of nonspeechlike vocalizations. The reason for this difference is unclear, but may be related to varying degrees of language impairment, cognitive ability, or autism severity across participant groups.…”

“…The lower speechlike vocalization rate for HRA+ toddlers is consistent with previous research (Patten et al, 2014;Paul et al, 2011;Plumb & Wetherby, 2013;Schoen et al, 2011;Warlaumont et al, 2014). The current study Figure 3.…”

“…One framework in which we might interpret these findings is the social feedback loop, proposed in Warlaumont et al (2014) and Patten et al (2014). Under this view, infants' speech production is shaped by caregiver responses, as demonstrated by work showing that infants who receive contingent feedback to their babbles restructure them to include phonological patterns from their caregivers' speech, whereas infants who receive noncontingent feedback do not (Goldstein & Schwade, 2008).…”

“…Warlaumont, Richards, Gilkerson, and Oller (2014), for example, found a significantly lower vocalization rate in 77 children with ASD aged 16-48 months, as well as a lower rate of speechlike vocalizations, compared with 106 typically developing (TD) children aged 8-48 months. Plumb and Wetherby (2013) compared 50 toddlers with ASD, 25 with non-ASD developmental delay (DD), and 50 TD toddlers who were between the ages of 18 and 24 months.…”

Intervention in the Context of Development: Pathways Toward New Treatments

“…Checklists of adaptive behaviors that can be anchored to specific activities (eg, getting dressed independently, calling a classmate on the phone) also show differences between active treatment and the comparator treatment in some studies but are less consistent (Warren et al, 2011a). Other promising objective measures include fine-tuned observation such as video recording of behavior (Corbett et al, 2014;Stronach and Wetherby, 2014), audio recording of verbal exchanges over the course of a typical day (Warlaumont et al, 2014), performance in computer games (Andari et al, 2010), or eye gaze tracking (Jones and Klin, 2013). Proposed biomarkers of treatment response include assessment of brain response such as EEG (Dawson et al, 2012) or MRI (Gordon et al, 2013).…”