Based on prior evidence of atypical vowel characteristics in autism and associations between speech motor skills and language intervention outcomes, this project aims to determine whether the accuracy and acoustic features of elicited vowel productions in minimally verbal autistic children predict treatment outcomes in a word learning intervention.  

This project explores how prelinguistic communication skills (e.g., gestures, social communication, comprehension) are associated with growth in canonical vocalizations over a 6-month period. This study is part of a larger longitudinal investigation of predictors of language outcomes in toddlers with autism. While there is evidence that canonical babbling is a unique predictor of language outcomes in children with autism, there is still limited evidence describing what skills may promote canonical vocalization development. Knowing what prelinguistic skills may be leveraged to promote vocalization development may then have cascading effects on language and can inform early intervention decisions. 

This project aims to determine how differences in two environmental factors, amount of caregiver language input and dyadic proximity/positioning, are associated with social communication scores during a naturalistic communication sample in typically developing children and children with 3 neurogenetic syndromes: Angelman syndrome (AS), Down syndrome (DS) and Fragile X syndrome (FXS).