This effect holds when controlling for cognitive functioning and age among autistic children, but is mediated by age among typically developing children. Attention to the speaker’s mouth and eyes while she was providing the label for the object also predicted shorter latencies of first look to the target object among autistic children. This work adds to a growing body of evidence that attention to social stimuli, and specifically attention to a speaker’s mouth in the early word learning stages of development may be adaptive for language acquisition in typically developing and autistic children (Young et al., 2009; Chawarska et al., 2012). These preliminary findings raise the possibility that attending to a speaker’s face may enhance word learning among autistic children. While our method does not allow for a strong interpretation that word learning had occurred, it did allow for a measure of visual search for the target. Further, the results within the task were consistent with the results on a standardized measure of language development. Given the small sample for these novel findings, replication will be necessary to confirm that this pattern will hold in the broader population.