ASD Toddlers Exhibit Impaired Development of Neural Systems That Respond to and Guide Mother-Child Interactions
Abstract Motherese is an experience-expectant, human-specific and innate form of parent speech that enhances social and language learning, and affect and emotion development in infants. An early sign of ASD is the child’s lack of responding to motherese and reduced social mother-child interactions. To learn why, we devised a novel experiment quantifying (a) neural responses to motherese and other emotion speech with sleep fMRI and (b) active behavioral preference for motherese with eye tracking in ASD and TD toddlers. We combined the power of diverse neural and clinical data types using Similarity Network Fusion to reveal four neural-clinical clusters. The ASD cluster with the weakest neural responses to motherese and the poorest social and language abilities had the lowest eye tracking attention to motherese, while the TD cluster with the strongest neural response to motherese showed the opposite effects. We conclude that the ASD child’s impairment in engaging in social mother-child interactions is due to impaired development of innate neural systems that normally respond to and guide behavior that maintains mother-child interactions.