Journal Article Reviews.

Autism, Communication English MS, Tenenbaum EJ, Levine TP, et al. Perception of cry characteristics in 1-month-old infants later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. J Autism Dev Disord. 2019;49:834–844. Evidence suggests that the preverbal vocalizations of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) differ from children without ASD, but the extent to which parents of children with and without ASD perceive these differences is unknown. This study recruited mothers of children with ASD (n 5 22) or typically developing controls (TD; n 5 20) to rate their perceptions of the cries of 1-month-old infants, some of whom would later be diagnosed with ASD. Audio recordings of cries were standardized 15-second samples obtained from a previous study and matched on developmental level and prenatal exposures. Mothers of children with ASD and TD children both rated the cries of children later diagnosed with ASD to be more distressing [F(1, 36) 5 45.62, p , 0.01], atypical [F(1, 37) 5 18.57, p , 0.01], and more reflective of pain [F(1, 39) 5 32.20, p , 0.01]. Parents of children with ASD had higher scores on a measure of broader autism phenotype (BAP) [t(40) 5 22.16, p 5 0.04], but BAP scores were not significantly correlated with parent perceptions of infant cries. While based on a small sample size, these results support the hypothesis that biomarkers associated with later ASD diagnosis are present in early infancy; moreover, the results do not support that exposure to a child with ASD or elevated BAP is associated with atypical perception of infant cries. Studies with more parent raters, more samples of infant cries, and acoustic analyses to characterize differences in infant cries in ASD are needed. C.B.N.