Attention to lexical stress and early vocabulary growth in 5-month-olds at risk for autism spectrum disorder

Typically developing infants differentiate strong-weak (trochaic) and weak-strong (iambic) stress patterns by 2 months of age. The ability to discriminate rhythmical patterns, such as lexical stress, has been argued to facilitate language development, suggesting that a difficulty in discriminating stress might affect early word learning as reflected in vocabulary size. Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have difficulty in correctly producing lexical stress, yet little is known about how they perceive it. The current study tested 5-month-old infants with typically developing older siblings (SIBS-TD) and infants with an older sibling diagnosed with ASD (SIBS-A) on their ability to differentiate the trochaic and iambic stress patterns of the word form gaba. SIBS-TD infants showed an increased interest in attention to the trochaic stress pattern, which was also positively correlated with vocabulary comprehension at 12 months of age. In contrast, SIBS-A infants attended equally to these stress patterns, although this was unrelated to later vocabulary size.