CARE News
Daniela’s Goodbye Party
This past week, we celebrated a new chapter for our beloved TESLA Parent Workshop leader moving on to an exciting opportunity, though we will miss her very much in the lab. You'll still be able to meet Daniela at the Saturday Parent Workshops that are one component of the TESLA study. Daniela loves animals (she has a dog and two cats at home!), so the cake was made to look like a bunny! Daniela worked with Helen for almost 20 years, and we had a nice party to cap them off.
CARE staff visit UCLA!
Some CARE lab members were at UCLA for a week last month to complete some necessary training for a new project we're starting in the new year with collaborators at UCLA (Dr. Connie Kasari's lab) and at Cornell (Dr. So Hyun Kim's lab), and while they were there, Emily took center stage to teach others about the ELSA assessment, developed here in our lab, during lunch!
A collaborator from Australia visited the lab
Over the past few years, we've been working with Professor Angela Morgan and a scientist in her group, Dr. Amanda Brignell, both of whom are speech and language pathologists at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, part of Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne, Australia. Drs. Morgan and Brignell have been working with us to look for signs of Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) in some individuals with autism. Recently, Dr. Brignell won the Hugh Rogers Fellowship that allowed her to travel to Boston and visit for a few weeks to continue her research. We very much enjoyed her time in the lab (complete with a crash course in the geography of Australia!) and look forward to continuing to work with her!
Celebrating Dr. Finch!
Kayla Finch, one of our wonderful graduate students here at CARE, is 'Dr. Finch' now! Dr. Finch successfully defended her doctoral dissertation research on "Neural Indices and Looking Behaviors of Audiovisual Speech Processing in Infancy and Early Childhood" last week.
Here she is with her committee: Dr. Helen Tager-Flusberg, Professor, our Center Director, and Kayla's primary mentor; Dr. Melissa Kibbe, an Assistant Professor and Director of the Developing Minds Lab, who chaired the committee; Dr. Finch herself; Dr. Amanda Tarullo, an Assistant Professor and Director of the Brain and Early Experiences Laboratory; and Dr. Charles Nelson, Professor at Harvard Medical School and Research Director in the Division of Developmental Medicine at Boston Children's Hospital.
Congratulations, Dr. Finch, we are so proud of you!
We Celebrated Two Birthdays This Month!
Here at CARE, both Helen, our Center Director, and Daniela, a Co-Investigator and Family Coordinator, share the same mid-March birthday! We celebrate with a cake at one of our lab meetings. This year, Helen blew out the candles (they were the sparkler kind and kept relighting!) while Daniela looked on. In the background is Trisha, one of our fabulous interns on the TESLA project.
Prevalence and Correlates of Psychiatric Symptoms in Minimally Verbal Children and Adolescents with ASD
As part of our Center's efforts to characterize the psychological profiles of children and adolescents with ASD who are minimally verbal, we recently published a paper describing the types and incidence of psychiatric symptoms in this population. Findings, based on parent report measures, indicated that the number of clinically significant psychiatric comorbidities emerged as the main predictor of problem behaviors. Nevertheless, the wide range of co-occuring psychopathology was not directly related to autism symptom severity, intellectual disability or limitations in adaptive functioning in our sample of children and adolescents. 
Read the full article here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6387942/
Can Computers Diagnose Autism?
A very informative article published by Spectrum News about the possibility of computers being able to distinguish individuals with autism from typically developing peers, as well as the mathematical and ethical challenges still in the way before this could become clinically useful.
Our project with Charles Nelson at Boston Children's Hospital is mentioned! Check out our page about that project here: https://www.bu.edu/autism/research/past-research/isp/
Development of fine motor skills is associated with expressive language outcomes in infants at high and low risk for autism spectrum disorder
A paper published in the Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders this year by Boin Choi, a student in Dr. Charles Nelson's lab at Harvard University, and in collaboration with Helen, our director, found that fine motor skills are associated with expressive language outcomes in high-risk infants. They found that high-risk infants who were later diagnosed with ASD had significantly slower growth in fine motor skills between 6 months of age and 2 years of age, and that fine motor skills at 6 months of age predicted expressive language outcomes at 3 years of age.
You can download the paper here: Choi_JNeurodevDisor_2018.
Autism and auditory processing disorder: What’s the connection?
Sophie Schwartz, one of our doctoral students, is Autism Speaks’ first Royal Arch Mason’s predoctoral fellow. Recently, Autism Speaks had a blog post highlighting Sophie's work here at the center! Sophie's work is part of the CAPS project, and examines auditory processing in typically developing individuals and those with ASD. Read the Autism Speaks blog post here.
Commentary: Measuring Language Change Through Natural Language Samples
Earlier this month, one of our doctoral students, Mihaela Barokova, had her latest paper published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. The paper examines the use of natural language samples as measures of expressive language and communication.
Here's the pubmed link! Happy reading!