This study explores the best way to teach two-year-old toddlers new verbs, and whether there are differences in what is best between late talkers and typically developing children. In a series of two, one-hour visits, children will watch videos on an eye-tracker, which will capture their face and gaze patterns. This data will be analyzed to see how children are making sense of what they are hearing. In one task, we ask whether it is better for children to hear a new verb before they see the action it denotes, or whether it is better to see the new action before hearing the verb. In the second task, we consider how quickly children are able to make sense of the language they hear, and whether this has any relationship to how they learn new verbs (Task 1). Results will help shape new clinical interventions for late talkers.

Learning new words is challenging for all toddlers, and it may be particularly challenging for toddlers who are late talkers. In this study, we ask whether late talkers use the same cues to figure out the meanings of new words as do their typically developing peers. Toddlers ages 2.0-2.5 will watch videos of people doing new actions and hear made-up words. An eye-tracking device will capture their face and their gaze patterns, and we will use this data to determine how they are making sense of the new words they are hearing. Results will provide insights into how toddlers learn new words and whether this process relates to toddlers' current language abilities.

Early intervention for infants and toddlers with or at-risk for autism spectrum disorder can promote developmental skills and improve lifelong outcomes. Yet, many children with ASD are not diagnosed until after age 3. In order to improve early detection of ASD, we are investigating very early predictors of social communication challenges in infants as young as 1 week to 6 months of age.

This research study examines how the development of attention and motor skills in the first year of life is associated with the emergence of social and communication skills in three groups of infants: infants who are first born or who have a sibling with no developmental delays, infants who have an older sibling diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, and infants who were born preterm.

Older adults typically have trouble identifying the speech they hear, especially in noisy environments. Fortunately, compared to younger adults, older adults are better able to compensate for difficulties identifying the speech they hear by recruiting the visual system. However, the extent to which older adults can benefit from visual input, and how this influence relates to age-related changes in brain structure and function, have not been thoroughly investigated. The general purpose of this study is to determine how age-related changes in brain structure and function affect how well people hear and see. This study seeks participants with normal hearing to mild hearing loss, who also have normal or corrected-to-normal vision.

We are recruiting mothers of children with typical development, autism, or fragile X syndrome.

This study focuses on parental experiences and normal individual differences that may influence child language development. The broader goal of the study is to understand which family experiences support language development in children who have neurodevelopmental disabilities, such as autism. We are recruiting families who have children who are typically developing, have autism, or have fragile X syndrome.