In April 2020, Allison Gladfelter, assistant professor, and NIU alum, Kacy Barron, published an article titled “How Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Developmental Language Disorder, and Typical Language Learn to Produce Global and Local Semantic Features” in the journal, Brain Sciences (https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/10/4/231).
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder are often thought to be more attuned to detail-specific information at the expense of processing more holistic, or global information. This project explored how this unique cognitive style impacts the way children with autism learn the meanings of new words. The overarching goal of this research is to learn the optimal ways clinicians, parents, and educators can teach children with autism new words.
In fact, this work was funded by a CISLL graduate student PoP grant awarded to Kacy Barron (formerly Kacy Kreger) during her master’s program in speech-language pathology at NIU. Kacy continues to serve families of individuals with autism clinically as an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) specialist and practicing speech-language pathologist in Florida.
If you want to learn more about autism month and autism in general, please visit https://www.autism-society.org/get-involved/national-autism-awareness-month/
Find out more about CISLL PoP grants by going to https://www.niu.edu/language-literacy/funding/index.shtml.
-This article was previously published by NIU’s Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language and Literacy
