Dr Sudha Arunachalam: "Tuning in: How do autistic and nonautistic parents support their children's language development?"

Children acquire the spoken or signed language(s) of their environment, and therefore, a great deal of research has examined the properties of the language children hear from their own parents. This work has highlighted the fact that parent language appears to be well "tuned" to the child's developmental level. For children with language delays, such as children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, however, the findings are more mixed. Some researchers highlight the ways in which parents of autistic children, too, produce developmentally appropriate language input, while other researchers highlight ways in which parent language input may be less optimal for these children. Surprisingly, virtually none of this research on parent language to autistic children has asked whether the parents themselves are autistic. Inspired by recent evidence indicating that autistic individuals are particularly well tuned to each other as conversation partners, I will present on the beginnings of a research project aimed at exploring this issue empirically.