We have received new NIH funding to continue our lab’s research focused on identifying specific language traits linked to brain and gene function involved in autism. This important award represents the 3rd cycle of continuous NIH funding for this project, which began in 2010. Many of our families may recall participating in those earlier stages of this work, which led to a number of major findings, with several summarized here. This next phase of the project brings together basic, translational, and clinical investigators across several institutions to support critical research on pragmatics, the social language skills that are most profoundly impacted in autism. The project studies families, both parents and children, to understand how language profiles extend beyond traditional diagnostic boundaries and may be linked with differences in the ways that the brain processes speech and language, and how this may be tied to patterns of molecular genetic variation. We are also turning a major focus to studying girls, who have been historically underrepresented in studies of pragmatics in ASD, to understand whether pragmatic skills are impacted differently in males and females with ASD. Important goals for our team will be to use findings from this study to generate findings, resources, and tools that will lead to improved understanding of the causes of social communication challenges in autism, and also shed light on the complex factors supporting complex social language use in us all.
