宝宝学习语言：既听声又“读唇”_BEC初级作文

宝宝学习语言：既听声又“读唇”

But Rhea Paul, director of the Yale Child Study Center's Laboratory of Development Communication Disorders, warned that an autism diagnosis is not so easily simplified, and it could be dangerous to make blanket claims regarding autism and eye attention.

"I think caution is always warranted when attempting to identify a single early 'marker' for a developmental disorder, such as failure to go back to looking at eyes at 12 months as a sign of autism, simply because of the great variability in behavior and development that is normal in the first couple of years of life," Paul told ABCNews.com.

Thirty percent of children that researchers attempted to test had to be eliminated for a variety of reasons.

"It could be that the children they could not test would have, if they could have been tested, provided a different set of results," Paul said. "The point is that we would need lots of replication and extension of studies of infant behavior before we could responsibly apply single behavioral measures as diagnostic standards. We should not be too quick to draw conclusions about a difference between a 'normal' group of infants -- from which will usually be excluded lots of fussy, wiggly, uncooperative but otherwise normal babies -- and a group with a single disorder."

A better way to identify diagnostic markers for a particular condition, such as autism, would be to compare infants at risk for autism, such as infant siblings of children already diagnosed with autism, with those at low risk for any disability and with those at high risk, due to family history, or other developmental disorders, Paul said.