July is Fragile X Syndrome (FXS) Awareness Month! During this time, those affected by FXS, their families, advocates, researchers, clinicians, and many others organize world-wide events to bring public awareness to FXS. Our lab is grateful to be part of the FXS community and work with some of these incredible families and individuals. We encourage [...]
In July 2024, the NDL was awarded the third renewal of A Family Genetic Study of Autism and Fragile X Syndrome (NIMH R01MH09113110). After we began the first phase of this project in 2012, our lab investigated clinical, language, and social-cognitive features that are characteristic of ASD and FMR1 conditions (fragile X syndrome (FXS) and FMR1 premutation (PM) carriers). We also [...]
Janna Guilfoyle (6th year, clinical psychology doctoral student) presented findings from her dissertation at the 2024 Frequency Following Response (FFR) Workshop in a talk entitled "Physiological mechanisms contributing to atypical pragmatics in autism: A study of neural speech perception and speech-motor articulation." This international conference was hosted in Chicago in June 2024 by our collaborators [...]
The Northwestern Institute of Developmental Sciences (DevSci) fosters interdisciplinary research collaborations as part of their “Healthier, Earlier” mission to promote strong foundations in wellbeing and learning for all children as early as possible in order to improve child and community-level outcomes. The NDL is proud to support DevSci's mission, and many of our graduate students [...]
Jiayin Xing, Mitra Kumareswaran, and Sarah Ethridge (from left to right) presented findings from their work investigating prosodic traits of speech among individuals with autism at the 2024 Meeting on Language in Autism at Duke University. […]
At the 2024 Meeting on Language in Autism (MoLA), Janna Guilfoyle (left, 6th year clinical psychology doctoral student) presented a poster titled, “Physiological mechanisms contributing to atypical pragmatics in autism: A study of neural speech perception and speech-motor articulation,” in which she demonstrates that both the fidelity of speech sound encoding and speech-motor articulatory skills [...]
Emily Landau, 5th year clinical psychology doctoral candidate, presented findings from her dissertation at the 2024 Meeting on Language in Autism. Her poster, “A Multi-Method Study of Pragmatic Language in Autistic Females," explored sex differences in social language use in storytelling and conversations.
Dr. Joe Lau presented exciting findings from a collaborative project with Dr. Rob Voigt from NU Linguistics titled, Using AI Large Language Models to Detect Pragmatic Language Markers of Autism during the 2024 Meeting on Language in Autism (MoLA) at Duke University.
We are proud to announce that Jiayin Xing, 6th Year Communication Sciences & Disorders doctoral student, successfully defended her dissertation titled, "Multi-Modal Skill Coordination in Social Communication: An Investigation in Autism Spectrum Disorder and First-Degree Relatives." Congratulations, Jiayin!!!
Our lab has recently published important findings showing how machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence (AI), may be used to capture clinically significant features of speech impacted in autism across different cultures and languages. This work was recently featured in Northwestern University Magazine, alongside other important findings from Northwestern, to discuss the potential of AI [...]
