Vocal Development and Social Communication Outcomes of Children with an Older Sibling with Autism - PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Early language skills are predictive of later social, cognitive, and interpersonal development and are often disrupted in the younger siblings of autistic children, who are at elevated likelihood for social communication impairments. Evidence suggests that discrete features of early vocalizations – including volubility and canonical proportion – are related to language development and often differ for siblings of autistic children. The proposed research investigates how early vocal features develop and interact with the emergence of more advanced social communication skills in this population and seeks to optimize these measures for translation into clinically meaningful assessments. The developmental progression of vocal features prior to 12 months of age has been relatively well-established; however, little is known about how these features develop across the second and third years of life, a time of rapid expansion of language and social communication skills. Furthermore, no studies have examined the association of vocal features with developmental outcomes three years of age, a time when diagnostic stability of autism and other social communication diagnoses is maximally balanced with the opportunity to capitalize on early intervention efforts leading to optimal outcomes. To fill these gaps in knowledge, Aim 1 will contrast the trajectories of early vocal features in infants at elevated likelihood for social communication impairments to those of infants without elevated likelihood from 12 to 36 months of age. Aim 2 will then determine the association of vocal feature trajectories with preschool outcomes at 36 months of age in infants at elevated likelihood for social communication impairments. Finally, Aim 3 will evaluate the representativeness of vocal features obtained from brief language samples compared to those obtained from daylong recordings, providing critical insight into the potential for these brief samples to serve as clinically translatable methods for assessing vocal development. The long-term goal of this research program is to identify vocal features as targets for early intervention that are easily assessed and reliably linked to later social communication skills. The candidate has assembled an expert team of mentors that will guide her career development in order to (1) advance her expertise in predicting social communication outcomes among children with an older autistic sibling, (2) obtain training in efficient processing of daylong language samples to generate reliable measures of vocal development and optimize them for clinical translation, (3) acquire proficiency in advanced statistical analysis of longitudinal vocalization data using random effects modeling in clinical samples, and (4) develop skills needed to pursue a successful career as a tenure-track faculty focused on translational research in populations at elevated likelihood for social communication differences. Overall, this project directly aligns with the mission of NIDCD to support behavioral research in disordered processes of speech and language as it characterizes the trajectories and developmental consequences of vocal development in children at elevated likelihood for social communication disorders, ultimately advancing translational efforts to effectively detect and intervene on these conditions.
