Children with autism don’t follow certain grammatical rules, according to one of the few studies of the disorder from the field of linguistics.

Autism’s bafflingly diverse array of language deficits — from word repetition to unusual syllable stresses to speaking in a monotone or sing-songy voice or not at all — has always been a hot topic of research. But the vast majority of studies in the past 30 years have focused on semantics, or the meaning of words, and pragmatics, the way that intentions, implications, history and other subtle social contexts affect meaning.

In contrast, the new study, published online 21 March in Applied Psycholinguistics, is one of a handful to look at autism and syntax, or the rules that govern how sentences are structured. The researchers found that children with autism don’t understand reflexive pronouns such as ‘himself’ and ‘herself.’

“What we’re arguing here is that autistic kids have some real grammatical deficits, not just communication deficits,” says lead investigator Ken Wexler, professor of brain and cognitive science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This distinction is important, he adds, because many computational linguists, including Wexler himself, believe that grammatical abilities are controlled by specific, innate structures in the brain, whereas semantic and pragmatic skills are more complicated and learned over time. Sorting out which deficits are common in autism could shed light on the brain systems derailed in the disorder.

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SFARI, April 2012.

Children with autism who have different verbal and intellectual abilities seem to glean useful social information from different parts of the face, according to the largest-ever eye-tracking study of the disorder.

These differences suggest that children with autism adapt to their environment based on their specific strengths and weaknesses, the researchers say.

The findings, published in the March issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, illustrate both the importance and the challenges of studying differences among people with autism.

“Different people have different compensatory strategies to navigate the demands of social life,” says lead investigator Ami Klin, chief of the division of autism and related disorders at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.

Experts applaud the study for taking an approach that’s only beginning to gain traction in the autism field: parsing the notoriously diverse disorder into smaller groups of children that share a particular trait, such as verbal ability. Doing so could help pinpoint new imaging or genetic biomarkers, and could help clinicians choose effective treatments, researchers say.

“The study highlights that any interventions that are used need to be specific to the child in question,” says Gwyneth Doherty-Sneddon, professor of psychology at Northumbria University in the U.K., who was not involved with the new study. “There are important individual differences, so an intervention that might work well with one group of children is not going to work well with another group.”

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SFARI, March 2012.

The development of white matter tracts, the nerve bundles that join one brain region to another, is different in babies who go on to develop autism compared with those who do not, according to a new study.

Researchers scanned the brains of infant siblings of children with autism — who have an increased risk of developing the disorder themselves — several times during their first two years of life. The so-called ‘baby sibs’ who go on to receive a diagnosis of autism at 24 months of age have distinct brain patterns at 6 months and abnormal neural development from 6 to 24 months, according to the study. The results were published 17 February in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

“The story is that autism is an unfolding process, not something that happens in the third trimester and then is done,” says lead investigator Joseph Piven, professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “We see the brain changing over time in a dynamic way.”

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SFARI, February 2012.