Failure to attune to language predicts autism in high risk infants

Young humans are typically sensitive to evolutionarily important aspects of information in the surrounding environment in a way that makes us thrive. Seeking to probe the putative disruptions of this process in infancy, I examined the statistical character of head movements in 52 9–10 mo-old infants, half at high familial risk (HR) for Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), who underwent an fMRI scan while listening to words spoken with alternating stress patterns on syllables. Relative to low risk (LR) infants, HR infants, in particular those showing the least rapid receptive language progress, had significantly lower noise-to-signal levels and increased symmetry. A comparison of patterns during a native language and a sleep scan revealed the most atypical ordering of signatures on the 3 tasks in a subset of HR infants, suggesting that the biological mechanism of language development is least acquisitive in those HR infants who go on to develop ASD in toddlerhood.