Belgian 'Language in Autism' Study

Many autistic children experience difficulties in language developement. Some children do not speak, some have delayed language development, and some have no problems in their language development. A proportion of children catch up by the age of seven, although this varies from child to child. It is still difficult to predict in what way autistic children will develop language. 

In general, language development is linked to socio-communicative skills (for example, imitating sounds and words or pointing to objects named by a parent), but for some autistic children, we believe there is also a link to other factors (for example, sleep quality or brain activity) that we want to investigate. This project, conducted collaboratively across multiple sites and two language communities, aims to follow the language development of 300 children diagnosed with autism. We will assess the effect of a range of socio-communicative and non socio-communicative aspects on the different trajectories of language acquisition observed among the participating children.