Research on ‘Broad Autism Phenotype’ potentially affecting direct relatives aims to better understand the broader picture of autism

It’s well established that children with autism often process audio-visual cues differently than their peers, especially during verbal communication. They may not make direct eye contact or focus intently on a speaker’s mouth. These differences in audio-visual speech perception may contribute to why children with autism show differences in language development when compared to peers.

Direct relatives of people with autism sometimes display similar traits, in a much milder form that may not even be noticed outside a lab. While the Broad Autism Phenotype—mild, sub-clinical autistic characteristics or behaviors in first-degree relatives of people with autism—has been studied extensively in siblings, few studies exist on parents of children with autism. Researchers in the University of Rhode Island Department of Communicative Disorders are looking to fill that gap to gain a better understanding of the traits of autism.

“We’re really trying to get a broad sense—not just kids with autism, not just parents, but really getting a larger birds-eye view of autism as a whole,” said Assistant Professor Alisa Baron, who is working with fellow Assistant Professor Vanessa Harwood on a high-tech look at speech perception among family members of children with autism. “We’re not trying to diagnose autism in parents; we’re really just trying to get a better understanding of what various characteristics that may be associated with autism.”

Harwood and Baron use eye-tracking technology to determine subtle differences in where participants tend to look when observing human and computer-animated faces speaking. That technology is combined with electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors that monitor brain activity to determine the neural response while observing speech—tiny differences in the number of neurons that fire in the brain when looking at a speaking face and how fast that firing happens.

“Speech perception is a pretty complicated phenomenon,” Harwood said. “While we hear information from a speaker, there’s a lot of learning that happens with face-to-face communication. We learn by looking at a speaker’s mouth and integrating it with what we hear. Persons with autism don’t gaze the same way at the eyes and the mouth; they don’t focus on them as much. This is just one theory why kids with autism might not develop language at the same levels as neuro-typical kids.”

The researchers examine differences in how the brain processes subtle aspects of speech to gain a better understanding of the broad autism phenotype. Studying direct relatives can help add to the knowledge base around the autism spectrum, giving researchers a wider look at the condition, the characteristics of which may be displayed in more people than researchers and clinicians realize.

“We look at autism broadly. We’re trying to think about putting all the pieces together,” Harwood said. “What are the characteristics of autism? How does it affect families? It’s a very complicated phenomenon. That’s why we’re looking at audio-visual speech perception within the population of kids with autism, and in a wide variety of people. We’ve done research on the broad autism phenotype in the population at large because there’s this population of humans that might have some elevated autistic traits.”

Harwood and Baron continue to recruit study participants interested in learning about their audio-visual speech perception and helping contribute to the growing body of knowledge around one of the fastest growing developmental disorders in the United States. Anyone who has a child with autism and is interested in participating can contact Baron or Hardwood at ccnl@etal.uri.edu.

“The parents who have come in, like the autism community at large, are generally deeply invested in finding answers,” Harwood said. “They’re really interested in finding better diagnostic processes, having earlier identification, and trying to find good interventions for persons with autism. We still don’t know why there’s such variance in communication abilities in persons with autism. We don’t understand the mechanism of that to this day. By gaining a better understanding of the traits of autism, we maybe can flesh out that picture a little better.”