Research spanning several decades has demonstrated that vocalizations differentiate young children with ASD from their typically developing peers and predict spoken language and other developmental outcomes in ASD. This panel presents recent findings from several different research groups on vocalization in infants and children with ASD. We open with a presentation that: a) highlights several ways in which the vocalizations of children with ASD differ from their typically developing peers, b) examines associations between these aspects of vocal development and other key domains of deficit in ASD, and c) explores how these differences in vocal development and other domains relate to later cognitive and communication outcomes in ASD. The subsequent series of talks draws on a large database from the LENA Research Foundation, as well as an independent sample of children with ASD who are in early stages of language development, to test the stability and/or validity of several current options for automated analysis of child vocalizations. Implications of the findings for research and clinical practice will be discussed.