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. 2021 Jul 16;11(7):939.
doi: 10.3390/brainsci11070939.

Early Visual Attention Abilities and Audiovisual Speech Processing in 5-7 Month-Old Down Syndrome and Typically Developing Infants

Jovana Pejovic  1 , Marisa Cruz  1 , Cátia Severino  1 , Sónia Frota  1
Affiliations

Early Visual Attention Abilities and Audiovisual Speech Processing in 5-7 Month-Old Down Syndrome and Typically Developing Infants

Jovana Pejovic et al. Brain Sci. .

Abstract

Communicative abilities in infants with Down syndrome (DS) are delayed in comparison to typically developing (TD) infants, possibly affecting language development in DS. Little is known about what abilities might underlie poor communication and language skills in DS, such as visual attention and audiovisual speech processing. This study compares DS and TD infants between 5-7 months of age in a visual orientation task, and an audiovisual speech processing task, which assessed infants' looking pattern to communicative cues (i.e., face, eyes, mouth, and waving arm). Concurrent communicative abilities were also assessed via the CSBS-DP checklist. We observed that DS infants orient their visual attention slower than TD infants. Both groups attended more to the eyes than the mouth, and more to the face than the waving arm. However, DS infants attended less to the eyes than the background, and equally to the face and the background, suggesting their difficulty to assess linguistically relevant cues. Finally, communicative skills were related to attention to the eyes in TD, but not in DS infants. Our study showed that early attentional and audiovisual abilities are impaired in DS infants, and might underlie their communication skills, suggesting that early interventions in this population should emphasize those skills.

Keywords: Down syndrome; attention; audiovisual processing; communicative abilities in infants.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Still-example frame from the audiovisual task. Marked in colors are the areas of interest analyzed in the task: the face, the eyes, the mouth, the arm, and the background.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Mean orientation latency (in seconds) in the visual attention task across the Down syndrome (DS) and typically developing (TD) groups. The values above the bars refer to the mean latency value for each group. Error bars represent 1 (+/−) standard error of mean.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Mean proportion of looking time in the audiovisual task across the Down syndrome (DS) and typically developing (TD) groups. Error bars represent 1 (+/−) standard error of mean. Significant differences are signaled: 0.05 = *, 0.01 = **, 0.001 = ***.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Scatter plot representing the relation between attention to the eyes in the audiovisual task, and gesture and communication score from the CSBS-DP for the TD group. Dots represent individual scores.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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