Social Communication Traits in Typical Hispanic Infants and Toddlers for Use in Autism Screening

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that the first Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) screening of development and behavior for all children can be completed as early as 9 months of age. To address this recommendation this study was aimed at describing the gestural and oral receptive and expressive social communicative behavior of typical Puerto Rican Hispanic children, using skills in the Early Social-Communication Scales (ESCS). Twenty Puerto Rican infants and toddlers, 10-14 months of age, were studied. Each participant was examined and observed (using video-audio recordings), by a trained speech-language pathology graduate student and a speech-language pathologist of the FILIUS Center. One clinician elicited while the other observed each child’s responses to the ESCS items. At the end, the recorded sessions were analyzed and discussed by the two observers to assign values to observed abilities on a scale of from 1 to 5 for each skill (1= does not execute; 5=very frequent execution). The strongest indicators of typical social communication in these Hispanic infants and toddlers demonstrate that, at that very early age, infants and toddlers are driven to interact with a stranger when accompanied by their mothers as a confirmation of their empathic dispositions. These strong indicators of social communication in typical Hispanic infants and toddlers can be observed by health professionals to identify difficulties in interaction skills as signs to refer children at-risk of autism.