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Hidden ability in autism

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We are a research group at the University of Cambridge, UK, who are interested in how autistic children understand spoken language. We would like to learn more about how their brains processes spoken words, using brain imaging technologies that are gentle and fast to set up. The aim of our research is to provide a chance for all autistic children, regardless of function, to demonstrate how well they understand word meanings. We hope to acheive this by creating suitable, reliable brain imaging measures that can be used as a marker of language processing in minimally-verbal autistic children.

Learn what our research is about 

This video is of Dr Selene Petit talking about why we are conducting this research. The take home message is that while each autistic child will be different, some children may  understand more than we think. We hope our research will result in new brain imaging methods that could detect such hidden language processing.

Help us with our research 

We are not currently testing due to the COVID19 pandemic however we are still proving information to families who might be interested in participating in the future. If you are interested in learning more and your child meets the criteria below please provide us with your email and we will send you on an information pack about our research study.  

If you answer yes to the following we would like to contact you.​

  • We live in the UK  

  • My child is aged between 5 - 15 years old

  • My family speaks English as their first language 

  • My child is not deaf or blind

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My child falls into one of the following groups

  • Has an autism spectrum diagnosis, and has limited or no spoken communication

  • Has an autism spectrum diagnosis, and does have spoken language  

Thanks for submitting!

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The science behind the research

Standard language assessments are ineffective in measuring language comprehension in non-verbal autism, a population that accounts for around 30% of autistic people. Levels of comprehension in non-verbal children is unknown as very little research is conducted on this population. The aim of our research is to use the well-established N400 effect that is seen as a reliable neural marker of language processing (Kutas and Federmeier, 2011). However, the reliability of this effect only holds true at the group level of analysis with a detection rates in single subject analysis revealing a detection rate of typically 50-60% in neuro-typicals (Cruse et al., 2014; Rohaut et al., 2015; Coderre et al., 2019). Much of the preparation for our research into non-verbal ASD has been exploring different ways in which we could improve the reliability of this ERP at the single subject level. 

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Key Publications: Petit et al. 2020

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Would you like to contact us regarding this research?  

Email: Dr Alyse Brown

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