How children with specific language impairment view social situations: an eye tracking study

Area of Science:

• Developmental psychology
• Neuroscience
• Speech-language pathology

Background:

• Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are at risk for social difficulties, but the developmental trajectory of these challenges is not well understood.
• Eye-tracking studies in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) provide a model for investigating social perception through gaze behavior.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the gaze behaviors of children with SLI to those of children with ASD and typically developing (TD) children.
• To explore social perception in children with SLI using eye-tracking methodology.

Main Methods:

• Eye gazes of 66 children (16 SLI, 25 ASD, 25 TD) were recorded while they watched videos of social interactions.
• Multidimensional scaling was used to analyze and visualize gaze behaviors, grouping participants with similar patterns.

Main Results:

• Children with SLI and TD children exhibited similar gaze patterns, clustering centrally, while children with ASD were distributed peripherally.
• Children with SLI and TD children followed the narrative in videos, whereas children with ASD paid less attention to social cues.
• Children with SLI fixated more on the mouth during speech compared to TD children, who focused on eyes and mouth.

Conclusions:

• Children with SLI demonstrate social perception distinct from ASD but similar to TD children.
• The heightened focus on mouths by children with SLI may indicate compensatory strategies for audiovisual processing differences.
• This difference in visual attention, particularly away from the eyes, could affect the social development of children with SLI.