Neural responses to affective speech, including motherese, map onto clinical and social eye tracking profiles in toddlers with ASD

Affective speech, including motherese, captures an infant’s attention and enhances social, language and emotional development. Decreased behavioural response to affective speech and reduced caregiver–child interactions are early signs of autism in infants. To understand this, we measured neural responses to mild affect speech, moderate affect speech and motherese using natural sleep functional magnetic resonance imaging and behavioural preference for motherese using eye tracking in typically developing toddlers and those with autism. By combining diverse neural–clinical data using similarity network fusion, we discovered four distinct clusters of toddlers. The autism cluster with the weakest superior temporal responses to affective speech and very poor social and language abilities had reduced behavioural preference for motherese, while the typically developing cluster with the strongest superior temporal response to affective speech showed the opposite effect. We conclude that significantly reduced behavioural preference for motherese in autism is related to impaired development of temporal cortical systems that normally respond to parental affective speech. Xiao et al. report that toddlers with autism, who have reduced behavioural preference for motherese speech as indexed through eye tracking, also have impaired brain responses to motherese in language regions, while typical toddlers show the opposite pattern.