ArticlePsychological science2014
A social feedback loop for speech development and its reduction in autism.
Article in Psychological science, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 160 papers, 7 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
160 citing papers in PubMed, 7 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 392 citations in OpenAlex.
- From data to discovery: Technology propels speech-language research and theory-building in developmental science.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2025Pooled it
- The use of Language ENvironment Analysis in autism research: A systematic review.Autism : the international journal of research and practice · 2025Pooled it
- Effectiveness of Responsivity Intervention Strategies on Prelinguistic and Language Outcomes for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Group and Single Case Studies.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2022Pooled it
- A systematic review and Bayesian meta-analysis of the development of turn taking in adult-child vocal interactions.Child development · 2022Pooled it
- Use of the LENA Autism Screen with Children who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing.Medicina (Kaunas, Lithuania) · 2019Pooled it
- The relation between parent verbal responsiveness and child communication in young children with or at risk for autism spectrum disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2019Pooled it
- Automated Language Environment Analysis: A Research Synthesis.American journal of speech-language pathology · 2018Pooled it
- The Language ENvironment Analysis (LENA) System in Toddlers With Early Indicators of Autism: Test-Retest Reliability and Convergent Validity With Clinical Language Assessments.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2025Trial
- Effects of pivotal response treatment on reciprocal vocal contingency in a randomized controlled trial of children with autism spectrum disorder.Autism : the international journal of research and practice · 2020Trial
- Comparing Intervention Outcome Measures Across Clinic and Home for Young Autistic Children: Brief Observation of Social Communication Change (BOSCC) and Measure of NDBI Strategy Implementation-Caregiver Change (MONSI-CC).Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2026Article
- Influence of Caregiver Input and Dyadic Arrangement on Naturalistic Communication Sampling for Children With Neurogenetic Syndromes.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2026Article
- Beyond Words: Natural Language Sampling of Lexical and Non-Word Vocalizations in Preschool Children with Autism, Down Syndrome, and Fragile X Syndrome.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Bridging Machine Learning and Event-Based Analyses to Assess Maternal Contingent Responses to Infant Nondistress and Distress Vocalizations From Home Audio Recordings.Developmental science · 2026Article
- What Dynamic Approaches Have Taught Us About Cognition and What They Have Not: On Values in Motion and the Importance of Replicable Forms.Topics in cognitive science · 2026Review
- Social and Linguistic Correlates of Vocabulary Size in Autism: Overlapping Vocalization and Phonological Memory.Journal of autism and developmental disorders · 2026Article
- Classification errors distort findings in automated speech processing: Examples and solutions from child-development research.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Thinking Critically About Algorithms for Automated Detection of Behavior: 11 Guidelines for Social and Behavioral Scientists.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Altered kinship vocal dynamics in marmosets with valproic acid-induced model of autism.iScience · 2026Article
- Parental Stress and Caregiver Role Modulate Child-Caregiver Prosodic Synchrony in Autism: A Computational Analysis.Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research · 2026Article
- Social communication development in a contingent world: insights from autism.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
100 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
We analyzed the microstructure of child-adult interaction during naturalistic, daylong, automatically labeled audio recordings (13,836 hr total) of children (8- to 48-month-olds) with and without autism. We found that an adult was more likely to respond when the child's vocalization was speech related rather than not speech related. In turn, a child's vocalization was more likely to be speech related if the child's previous speech-related vocalization had received an immediate adult response rather than no response. Taken together, these results are consistent with the idea that there is a social feedback loop between child and caregiver that promotes speech development. Although this feedback loop applies in both typical development and autism, children with autism produced proportionally fewer speech-related vocalizations, and the responses they received were less contingent on whether their vocalizations were speech related. We argue that such differences will diminish the strength of the social feedback loop and have cascading effects on speech development over time. Differences related to socioeconomic status are also reported.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.