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Differences in Neural Correlates of Speech Perception in 3 Month Olds at High and Low Risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder

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Abstract

In this study, we investigated neural precursors of language acquisition as potential endophenotypes of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in 3-month-old infants at high and low familial ASD risk. Infants were imaged using functional near-infrared spectroscopy while they listened to auditory stimuli containing syllable repetitions; their neural responses were analyzed over left and right temporal regions. While female low risk infants showed initial neural activation that decreased over exposure to repetition-based stimuli, potentially indicating a habituation response to repetition in speech, female high risk infants showed no changes in neural activity over exposure. This finding may indicate a potential neural endophenotype of language development or ASD specific to females at risk for the disorder.

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Notes

  1. The association between sex and ASD differs with cognitive ability. In children who are cognitively high functioning, the sex ratio may be more than 5.5:1 (M:F), while in children with intellectual disability (ID), the ASD sex ratio is closer to 2:1 (Newschaffer et al. 2007).

  2. Hair, particularly that which is highly pigmented, interferes with NIRS measurements by absorbing near-infrared (NIR) light from source optodes before it penetrates the skull and arrives at the brain tissue. NIRS headgear is thus designed to keep hair out of the path of NIR light as much as possible. Many adaptations for reducing interference by hair may cause discomfort however, making them inappropriate for studies on infant populations.

  3. These regions of interest (ROIs) cover roughly identical topographies as those used by Gervain et al. (2008). We include fewer channels in each ROI average herein, in order to distinguish regional brain activity more clearly than was perhaps possible in Gervain’s study of newborns (who have smaller average head sizes than 3 month olds) and to maintain consistency with other studies conducted in our lab, using the same NIRS headgear (i.e., Keehn et al. 2013; Wagner et al. 2011).

  4. Mauchly’s test of sphericity indicated that the assumption of sphericity had been violated for the main effect of region, χ2(5) = 27.40, p < 0.001. Therefore, degrees of freedom were corrected using Greenhouse–Geisser estimates of sphericity (ε = 0.64 for the main effect of region).

  5. Mauchly’s test of sphericity indicated that the assumption of sphericity had been violated for the main effect of region, χ2(5) = 18.33, p = 0.003. Therefore, degrees of freedom were corrected using Greenhouse–Geisser estimates of sphericity (ε = 0.705 for the main effect of region).

  6. The exposure effects herein are likely not an artifact of the number of trials that participants heard, as the majority (n = 33; 87%) of participants listened to all 28 trials, 2 participants (5.3%) stopped after 25 trials, 1 (2.6%) stopped after 24 trials, 1 (2.6%) stopped after 23 trials, and 1 (2.6%) stopped after 19 trials. Additionally, the number of trials heard did not differ significantly between risk groups (p = 0.18), genders (p = 0.65), or syllabic sequence type (p = 1.00). Finally, the four-way interaction between exposure, syllabic sequence type, risk group and gender was robust to the inclusion of number of trials heard as a covariate in the mixed-design (2 × 4 × 2 × 2x2) ANOVA: exposure × syllabic sequence type × risk group × gender (F(1,32) = 5.46, p = 0.026, partial η2 = 0.146); all interactions with number of trials (p > 0.05).

  7. At the request of a reviewer, we conducted a 2 (syllabic sequence type) × 4 (region) × 2 (risk group) × 2 (exposure) mixed-design ANOVA, to examine exposure results collapsing across gender. This analysis revealed that the main effect of region was significant when gender was not included as a between-subjects factor (F(2.09, 75.15, corrected using Greenhouse–Geisser estimate of sphericity (ε= 0.696)) = 3.45, p = 0.046, partial η2 = 0.081). Additionally, elimination of HRA females from the sample extinguished the main effect of region over exposure (F(3,24) = 0.591, p = 0.627).

  8. Preliminary analyses of this nature—based on a subset of the present sample—suggest that the magnitude of the fNIRS neural response to the last four ABB stimuli predicts MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory-III (Fenson et al. 2007) gesture production (p < 0.001, R2 = 0.7005) and sentence complexity (p < 0.001, R2 = 0.4999), and Mullen Scales of Early Learning (Mullen 1995) expressive language scores (p < 0.001, R2 = 0.5052) for both LRC and HRA subjects at 18 months, across gender.

  9. It is also possible that the gender effects found herein are confounding results that are instead attributable to participants’ eventual ASD outcomes (since more males than females will go on to develop ASD). Unfortunately, we did not have the statistical power to test this hypothesis directly, as only 19 of the 38 infants (11 LRC, 8 HRA) analyzed herein returned for clinical evaluation and diagnosis confirmation (or lack thereof) at 36 months of age.

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Acknowledgments

We are extremely grateful to the families for their invaluable contribution to the Infant Sibling Project. We would also like to acknowledge the Infant Sibling Project staff—Tara Augenstein, Lauren Baczewski, Leah Casner, Kristin Concannon, Frances Cooley, Morgan Crossman, Kerri Downing, Mary Kate Driscoll, Sharon Fox, Brandon Keehn, Jack Keller, Nina Leezenbaum, Vanessa Loukas, Rhiannon Luyster, Stephanie Marshall, Sarah Mumanachit, Anne Seery, Meagan Thompson, Vanessa Vogel-Farley, and Anne-Marie Zuluaga—for their assistance in data acquisition.

Funding

This research was supported by NIH R01-DC010290 to Helen Tager-Flusberg and Charles A. Nelson and The Simons Foundation (137186) to Charles A. Nelson.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Marcus Autism Center, 1920 Briarcliff Rd NE, Atlanta, GA, 30329, USA

    Laura A. Edwards

  2. College of Staten Island, City University of New York, 2800 Victory Boulevard, Building 4S Room 209, Staten Island, New York, 10314, USA

    Jennifer B. Wagner

  3. Boston University, 64 Cummington Mall, Room 170D, Boston, MA, 02215, USA

    Helen Tager-Flusberg

  4. Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard University, 1 Autumn St., 6th Floor, Boston, MA, 02215, USA

    Laura A. Edwards & Charles A. Nelson

  5. Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Laura A. Edwards & Charles A. Nelson

Authors
  1. Laura A. Edwards
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  2. Jennifer B. Wagner
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  3. Helen Tager-Flusberg
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  4. Charles A. Nelson
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Contributions

LAE, JBW, HTF, and CAN conceived of the study and its design. LAE processed, analyzed and interpreted the data, and drafted the manuscript. All authors contributed intellectual content and critical revisions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Charles A. Nelson.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interests.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. All study procedures were monitored and approved by the Boston Children’s Hospital Institutional Review Board under IRB protocol X10-02-0083.

Additional information

This paper was prepared from the doctoral dissertation of Laura A. Edwards (2015). It was presented as a poster at the 2016 International Meeting for Autism Research in Baltimore, MD, USA, on May 14, 2016. It is part of a larger longitudinal investigation (“The Infant Sibling Project”) conducted at Boston Children’s Hospital and Boston University.

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Edwards, L.A., Wagner, J.B., Tager-Flusberg, H. et al. Differences in Neural Correlates of Speech Perception in 3 Month Olds at High and Low Risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder. J Autism Dev Disord 47, 3125–3138 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3222-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-017-3222-1

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