Our methods
Our methods
Studying language comprehension in
autistic minimal, unreliable and non-speakers
Around 30% of autistic people have no or minimal spoken language. Despite a dramatic rise in global funding for autism research over the past few decades, autistic non-speakers have remained chronically under-researched. As a result, we know very little about autistic non-speakers' language comprehension abilities.
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The aim of our research program is to address this research gap by developing novel methods for studying language comprehension in autistic minimal, unreliable and non-speakers.​​​
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Current study: Brain signatures of language comprehension
The aim of this study is to reliably detect 'brain signatures' of language comprehension in autistic non- and minimal speakers.
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We use a brain recording tool called 'electroencephalography' (EEG) to record participants' brain activity as they listen to a series of spoken sentences.
Some of the sentences end in a word that is congruent with the rest of the sentence (e.g., The clouds are high up in the sky), and some end in a word that does not make sense in the sentence (e.g., The clouds are high up in the door).​
​​A difference in the brain response between the congruent and incongruent sentences would offer neural evidence of language comprehension.
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We are analysing the data and look forward to sharing the results soon.​
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Watch this video by former Woolgar Lab researcher, Dr Selene Petit, to learn more about this study.
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Key Publication: Petit et al. 2020
Future Work: Decoding individual speech processing "fingerprints"
Thanks to new funding from the BRAIN foundation, in collaboration with Dr. Laura Gwilliams from Stanford University, we are starting a new study this year!
We will record from people's brains as they listen to an audiobook, and use advanced machine learning to understand how each person processes different aspects of natural language, from speech sounds and individual words, through to meanings and grammar. We hope this will give us a highly detailed understanding of speech comprehension in non-speaking autism and a new method to quantify each individual non-speaker’s profile of strength and weakness in speech processing.
If you are a non-speaker in the UK and you would like to help us with this study, please get in touch below!
Get in touch!
We would love to hear from autistic non- and minimal-speakers, their families, practitioners and other stakeholders.
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Please complete the form below if you would like to join our mailing list, find out more about our research, participate in our research, ask a question, or offer suggestions for future research studies.​
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If you recently heard us present about our work and have comments or suggestions, please put them in the comment box below. Thank you!