Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Exploring Language Use Within A Parent-Mediated Intervention For Children Exhibiting Social Communication Difficulties, Emily Garza, Ashleigh Kellerman, Christi Masters, A.J. Schwichtenberg

Discovery Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Research Internship

For infants/toddlers experiencing social communication difficulties, parent-mediated interventions (PMI) are the current field standard to promote development within a natural context. Previous research highlights the importance for parents to scaffold language learning opportunities beyond clinical settings to maximize children’s potential. However, for infants/toddlers exhibiting social communication-based difficulties currently enrolled in a family routines-based PMI, less is known about the individual contributions of communication between child and parent in order to promote optimal language development.

The present study expands our understanding of children’s communication by examining whether (1)children exhibit language impairments at enrollment; (2)whether observed mother-child communication during play increases following …

Under-Reactive But Easily Distracted: An Fmri Investigation Of Attentional Capture In Autism Spectrum Disorder, Brandon Keehn, Aarti K N Nair, Alan J. Lincoln, Jeanne Townsend, Ralph Axel Müller

Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences Faculty Publications

For individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), salient behaviorally-relevant information often fails to capture attention, while subtle behaviorally-irrelevant details commonly induce a state of distraction. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neurocognitive networks underlying attentional capture in sixteen high-functioning children and adolescents with ASD and twenty-one typically developing (TD) individuals. Participants completed a rapid serial visual presentation paradigm designed to investigate activation of attentional networks to behaviorally-relevant targets and contingent attention capture by task-irrelevant distractors. In individuals with ASD, target stimuli failed to trigger bottom-up activation of the ventral attentional network and the cerebellum. …