Caregiver Cry Perception and Developmental Trajectories of Infant-Caregiver Interactions Involving Cry as an Early Marker of Autism

Project Summary
Caregivers of children with autism spectrum disorders often recall differences in their children as early as
infancy, despite most children with autism being diagnosed after age 3. Caregiver recall of behavioral
differences in infancy indicates that there is more to learn from the earliest developmental periods of children
later diagnosed with autism that could ultimately contribute to earlier screening and earlier interventions.
Understanding the prodromal period could identify sources of heterogeneity in autism phenotypes, such as
social communication deficits and delayed language, which are highly variable and predictive of long-term
outcomes in the autism population. Investigating emerging communication processes is an important domain
to focus on in early development. Infant cries are part of the earliest communicative exchanges for humans.
Cry characteristics impact caregiver perceptions and responses to their infants and thus may impact early
communication development. Differences in cry acoustics associated with later autism diagnoses have been
observed as early as 6 months, and caregivers have perceived autism-related differences in cries from
infants as young as 1-month of age. These findings support cry acoustics as an early risk marker of autism.
Aim 1 will replicate and extend the association between caregiver cry perception and autism outcomes to
aid in identification of the objective acoustic features driving the perceptual differences , requiring collection
of new caregiver ratings of cries from an existing library. Aim 2 will consist of detailed analysis of existing
daylong recordings to capture a phenotype of social contingency development through analysis of caregiver-
infant turn-taking involving cry over the first 12 months of life. The project will utilize recordings collected at
1, 3, 6, 9, and 12 months in children with and without autism. In addressing these aims and preparing for a
career as an independent investigator, the PI will be trained in three primary areas: 1) the autism spectrum
disorder phenotype and clinical knowledge, 2) measurement and data analysis relevant to prospective
longitudinal studies of developmental disorders and developmental trajectory phenotypes, and 3)
professional development, especially focused on training in grant writing and presenting research to multiple
academic disciplines and stakeholders. The research projects and training plan leverage the sponsor and
co-sponsor’s existing data (cry recordings and daylong recordings collected longitudinally), expertise in
autism and infant cry (sponsor) and statistical analysis (co-sponsor), experience in training and mentoring
(sponsor and co-sponsor), and the PIs strong foundation of research experience and commitment to multi-
disciplinary research of atypical language acquisition.

Grant Number: 5F32MH134481-02
NIH Institute/Center: NIH
Principal Investigator: ERIN ANDRES