We had four main hypotheses. First, based on previous findings using video stimuli in which a speaker directly addresses a child (Chawarska et al., 2012), we predicted that autistic children would look less at the stimuli and less at the speaker’s face and mouth than the control groups.
Second, based on previous findings with typically developing and at-risk children, we predicted that attention to the mouth would be related to better language skills among typically developing children (Young et al., 2009).
Third, based on a view that language deficits in autism stem from atypical gaze which results in missed opportunities to learn from social scenes, we predicted that children with autism who do look at the informative areas of the scene for language learning (i.e., the eyes, mouth, and referent object) will be more successful at language learning than those who do not.
Finally, we hypothesized that language impairments among those without autism are attributable to language specific impairments rather than social deficits, and thus we predicted that attention to social stimuli would be unrelated to language development among the language impaired participants without autism.