Language assessment in young children with an autism diagnosis

The majority of young children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) display a significant delay in their language development. The evolution of their language skills between the ages of two and seven follows different patterns: some children rather steeply reach typical levels, others progress more slowly to phrase speech, and still others remain minimally verbal. Language development in ASD is usually conceived as depending on the improvement of socio-communicative skills, much as in typically developing children. However, there are reasons to believe that in some children linguistic development may follow an atypical pattern, partly independent of social interaction and communication. In our multi-site and multilingual project, language will be longitudinally followed by collecting and qualitatively analysing day-long audio-recordings in a large cohort of young autistic children. To delineate different language acquisition pathways, non-social and social cognitive skills will be assessed using behavioural, eye-tracking and EEG tasks, along with detailed questionnaires which will target the child's environment and development. With this project we aim to establish a major breakthrough in the understanding of autism and contribute substantially to the development of new intervention techniques.