WASHINGTON – A device may be able to automatically screen young children for autism based on how they talk, US researchers said yesterday.
The small recorder fits into a child’s pocket and analyses the words they say during the day, and a software program then evaluates how the child makes certain sounds.
A team of researchers led by Professor Kimbrough Oller of the University of Memphis analysed more than three million syllabic utterances, collected from almost 1,500 recordings from 232 children aged 10 months to four years.
The program correctly identified an existing autism diagnosis 86 per cent of the time. The analysis also estimated the age of a typically developing child, said the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Although clinicians have been saying for many years that they think autistic kids sound strange when they talk, there’s been no practical way to use vocalisation as a part of the diagnostic or screening procedure in working with autism,” said Prof Oller.
The tests were conducted in English, but Prof Oller said the technique may apply to other languages.
Doctors now diagnose autism by testing children for a range of behavioural and speech issues including how much they talk by a certain age and whether they make eye contact with people.
“Autism is a multi-factorial disorder and it has many behavioural dimensions to consider. And vocalisation is clearly an important one,” said Prof Oller. “But I certainly don’t think it should be used exclusively.”
Oller, who studies language learning and language evolution, has identified how the formation of different syllables changes during a child’s first four years.
Instead of saying “ba” as part of a longer word, for instance, a young child might at first say “ba-a”, with “sort of a staccato or tremor kind of pattern”, said Oller.
The speech development of autistic children does not follow those typical patterns, the analysis shows.
The software distinguishes among speakers and processes sounds made only by the child being studied. Parents send the recorder back to the company after the child has worn it for a day and the company analyses the recording for language development progress and autism. – (Reuters)