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Words with friends: Social cues help children learn language even before their first birthday.
A distinct pattern of brain waves related to language comprehension predicts how well 2-year-old children with autism will fare on a range of cognitive measures later in childhood, according to unpublished research presented last week at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society annual meeting in San Francisco.
Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington in Seattle has been studying language acquisition for several decades. In the new study, she used electroencephalography (EEG), a noninvasive method of measuring brain activity through electrodes on the scalp.
Studies of typically developing children have shown that their brains produce a distinct EEG signature when listening to a word that they know compared with one they don’t know1.
Kuhl’s team looked for this signature in about two dozen 2-year-old children with autism. She divided the children into two subgroups based on their social scores on the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule.
Compared with the lower-scoring subgroup, the higher-scoring subgroup showed an EEG response to known words that is more similar to that of typically developing children, the researchers found.
More provocatively, having that EEG signature at age 2 predicted the children’s scores on tests of cognitive ability, adaptive behavior and receptive language at age 4, Kuhl said during a keynote lecture at the meeting. At age 6, the correlation is even stronger.
“It’s a very, very good predictor,” Kuhl said. “If a child at 2 with autism shows the ability to lock onto known words and show that signature effect, that represents a complex style of learning that will give them an advantage in all facets of learning as they progress.”
Kuhl plans to look for similar signatures in younger children with autism and in the baby siblings of children with the disorder, who have a high risk of developing the disorder themselves. This could help identify children most in need of early intervention. “The age of 2 is still too late, in our minds,” she said.
This is the latest of many studies from Kuhl’s lab on the importance of social interactions in language acquisition. No one knows much about the mechanisms that allow human interaction to bootstrap language — nor how this process may be impaired in autism. “This social piece we don’t really understand,” she said.
References:
1. Mills D.L. et al. Dev. Neuropsych. 13, 397-445 (1997) Abstract
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