LANGUAGE IN AUTISM: CLINICAL AND BASIC STUDIES

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This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. Language and communicative impairments are among the core features that define autism. Universal symptoms of this impairment include deficits in pragmatic aspects of language, which are closely tied to theory of mind deficits, and social-communicative deficits that involve non-verbal channels of communication, including the ability to process faces and their communicative signals. There is also a subgroup of individuals with autism who have additional linguistic impairments, which include deficits in phonology, lexical and grammatical knowledge. We plan to pursue these language and social-communicative deficits in three projects, all involving the same groups of children with autism, specific language impairment (SLI) and normal controls. Project I will investigate abnormalities in the perception of faces and their communicative signals, exploring the relationship between these deficits, other aspects of visual attention and perception, and social impairment in autism. Project II will investigate deficits in language processing in autism, to further characterize similarities between the autism subgroup and SLI. Project III will use structural and functional imaging methods (MRI) to investigate the relationships between the cognitive/linguistic deficits in Projects I and II with underlying brain pathology in autism. Project III is covered by a separate IRB protocol #H- 23658. The projects will be served by a unified Clinical and Administrative Core that will recruit and assess the children participating in these projects, maintain the program project database, provide statistical consultation, and coordinate all the administrative activities for the program project.