Current Studies
Want to participate in a research study? Please visit call-lab.ku.edu to learn about current opportunities
to participate in the Comprehension and Language Learning Lab.
More or Less Social Comprehension Project
Status: Data Collection
The overall objective of this project is to investigate how child factors (linguistic and social) and text factors (linguistic and social) impact comprehension in autistic children (9- to 12-years). We will (1) Examine how listening comprehension of more and less social texts differs for autistic children; (2) Identify child predictors (linguistic and social) of listening comprehension for more and less social texts; and (3) Identify text predictors (linguistic and social) of listening comprehension for more and less social texts. The central hypothesis is that both child and text factors impact comprehension and that social and linguistic child and text factors diferentially contribute, depending on the content of the text.
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This work is supported by an R21 Early Career award (R21DC020786-01) from the National Institute on Deafness and Communication Disorders (NIDCD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Spoken and Written Language Comprehension Interventions for School-Age Autistic Children: A Systematic Review
Status: Data Collection
The purposes of this systematic review are to:
Determine the spoken and written language comprehension interventions available for speech-language pathologists to use with school-age children with autism.
Assess how these available interventions address the developmental comprehension needs of school-age children with autism.
Synthesize our understanding of how spoken language comprehension interventions improve written language comprehension outcomes.
Social Communication in Comprehension Project
Status: Data Analysis; Manuscripts in preparation
This project is investigating how social communication as background knowledge contributes to understanding of more social and less social stories. Phase 1 collected data using an unmoderated data collection approach during COVID-19 to collect pilot data from 4- to 11-year-old non-autistic children. Phase 2 collected data using a combined moderated and moderated data collection approach during COVID-19 to collect data from 7- to 9-year-old autistic and non-autistic children.
This work was supported by startup funds from the University of Kansas and a New Investigator Research
Grant from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation (ASHFoundation).
Children's Books Text Analysis
Status: Manuscript Under Review
The purpose of this project is to design and evaluate a measure (or measures) of
a book’s social content, or what we call, text socialness.
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This work was supported by startup funds from the University of Kansas.
