'Motherese' plus eye-tracking may help with early diagnosis of autism

'Motherese'—the cutesy, high-pitched voice adults use to talk to their babies and toddlers—may be useful as a tool to help identify autism when combined with eye-tracking. To investigate whether attention toward motherese can help diagnose and classify autism spectrum disorder (ASD), researchers used an eye-tracking device to quantify the amount of attention children paid to adult voices. Findings were published in JAMA Network Open. Motherese speech is used across cultures and is known to stimulate attention and learning. Plus, it is associated with improved language acquisition, affective engagement and emotional reactions. However, some children with ASD have little response to auditory information such as not responding when their name is called, the researchers noted. This study was designed to investigate whether the type of language can be used as a diagnostic classifier of ASD, and if it is associated with language and social ability. Researchers noted that in a previous brain imaging study, toddlers with ASD with the lowest levels of attention to motherese speech showed the lowest levels of neural functional activation in speech-processing regions and lower language abilities than other toddlers. Eye-tracking is a relatively new approach for characterizing attention in ASD and may be helpful for screening and diagnosis. But little work has been done using it to help understand attention patterns in response to speech. A total of 653 toddlers aged 12 to 48 months were included in the study. They had a mean age of 26.45 months, 480 (73.51%) were male and the cohort was racially diverse. Toddlers younger than 30 months were invited for a reevaluation every nine to 12 months until their third birthday, when a final diagnosis of ASD was given. The toddlers were categorized into five groups: ASD (422 participants); ASD features (29); delay or other (75 children); typical development (115 children); and typical sibling of an ASD proband (12 children). Each participant was shown two videos while undergoing eye-tracking measurements. One was of an actress speaking in motherese, and one non-human scene (either a busy highway or a movie of abstract shapes and numbers with accompanying electronic music). The amount of time the toddlers spent focusing (fixation) on the different videos was calculated and compared between groups. Toddlers without ASD had a consistently greater interest in the motherese, spending just over 80% of the experiment watching that video. They spent less time fixated on the traffic and abstract videos. The toddlers with ASD showed inconsistent times with their fixation levels ranging from 0% to 100% of the viewing times. But patterns appeared depending on the type of ASD diagnosis they had and age. “When toddlers with ASD were stratified as having low, middle or high levels of attention toward motherese speech, significant differences in social and language abilities between the subtypes were observed,” the study said. The subset of toddlers who fixated on motherese less than 30% of the time could be accurately identified as having ASD through this measurement, the study said. These children also showed lower scores on language and social skills tests. Toddlers with ASD who spent more time attending to motherese showed greater social and language abilities, highlighting the diversity within the ASD spectrum. The tests “may be useful as a screening or diagnostic tool to identify toddlers in most need of immediate attention,” the study said.

'Motherese' plus eye-tracking may help with early diagnosis of autism

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