On May 1, before several of us jetted off to INSAR 2023 in Stockholm, the Child Language Lab’s members gathered together at Letty’s house

for an end-of-school-year celebration and sendoff to our graduating seniors.

We are so proud of Maddie Riascos, Sarah Cintron, Sede Osahon, Jaydel Hernandez, Aliah Segui, and Julia Johnson for completing

their UConn undergraduate education, and we wish them great success in their futures!

(pictured below, left to right, with Letty)

We also sincerely thank the following undergraduates for their outstanding work in the lab in the 2022-23 school year:

Harish Ravichandran, Robbi Zamora, Lindsey Gaspard, Kristina DeMichiel, Audra Giugno,

Yasmin Andalib, Liz Sahagun, Aayaat Saiyed, and Sarah Courtney.

(pictured below, top to bottom, with our graduating seniors, graduate students Cynthia and Kaya,

lab manager Grace, and visiting graduate student Junyou Su)

From March 23-25, members of the Child Language Lab converged on Salt Lake City for the 2023 biennial Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) conference. CLL has been attending SRCD’s conferences for years, and we are so proud to have brought along three of our amazing senior undergraduates, each of whom had their own poster, to the 2023 conference. All in all, our posters spanned a wide range of subjects, including autistic individuals 2-22 years of age, Theory of Mind (ToM), the influences of caregiver input on children’s language, phonological development, auditory brainstem research, and numerous others. We were also privileged to meet and hear from hundreds of fellow researchers making an impact on the field of developmental research.

See below for a slideshow of our favorite moments (all posters can be viewed in more detail on our Posters & Presentations page):

Please note that our group stayed masked at SRCD except to take photos and present our posters.

From March 9-11, 2023, members of the Child Language Lab convened with over 100 other professionals studying language in autism at the first-ever Meeting on Language in Autism (MOLA). MOLA was first scheduled for March 2020, but due to the pandemic, was postponed indefinitely and finally took place this year. The organizers (Rhiannon Luyster, Letty Naigles, Gordon Ramsay, & Elena Tenenbaum) did not give up on hosting the conference, and the first MOLA was a resounding success. We heard from speakers including Helen Tager-Flusberg (BU), saw over 60 posters, and socialized with attendees who flew in from dozens of places, including Belgium and Japan.

See below for a slideshow of our conference highlights:

We are so pleased to share that our incredible honors student, Jaydel Hernandez, has been featured on the NIDCD’s 2022 list of Diversity Scholars, a group of talented people conducting health-related research. Jaydel, a Psychology and HDFS (Human Development & Family Sciences) double major, has been with the Child Language Lab since spring 2021, and she is now preparing her honors thesis in Psychology under Letty’s mentorship. See her achievement and research aims here.

Our impressive graduate student, Kaya LeGrand, attended the 2022 American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) Convention in New Orleans from November 17-19. Kaya, who worked as a licensed speech-language pathologist before beginning her PhD program at UConn, presented her poster, “Early Verb Production in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)”, at the conference. Congratulations on a successful conference visit, Kaya!

Numerous current and former members of the Child Language Lab headed to Boston from November 3-6 to witness Letty deliver the plenary address at the 47th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD). Letty’s talk, entitled “Autism Illuminates Language: Acquisition, Development, Use”, enlightened and inspired listeners. We are so proud of her!

Our fantastic graduate student Amanda Mankovich recently had her paper, “Say that again: Quantifying patterns of production for children with autism using recurrence analysis”, published in Frontiers in Psychology. Congratulations, Amanda!

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Last Friday, the team took advantage of the beautiful weather and hiked on Soapstone Mountain. It was our last chance to be in-person for quite some time, as Dr. Naigles is about to depart on a multi-week trip to Denmark and Switzerland as part of her sabbatical. Additionally, it was our last chance to say goodbye to Juandiego Carmona, our former lab coordinator, who will be starting his PhD this fall at Teacher’s College, Columbia University. We are going to miss Juandiego but are so proud of him and hope he has an amazing time in NYC!

Yesterday, we held a fully in-person Grad Lab meeting for the first time since our new personnel (lab coordinator Grace, honors student Julia, and McNair Scholar Sarah) joined the lab in June. It was great getting to see everyone in real life, albeit masked. We discussed upcoming conferences, trainings, and projects, then took a group photo* at the end. Next up: our team-building group hike in a few weeks!

*All members are fully vaccinated and were only unmasked for the duration of the photo.

Our incredible undergraduate McNair Scholar Sarah presented her research poster, “Child Vocalization Development Coded Through the International Phonetic Alphabet: A comparison of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Typically Developing Children,” at the 10^th Annual McNair Scholars Summer Poster Exhibit today! Sarah spent her summer transcribing typically developing and autistic low- and middle-verbal participants’ vocalizations into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), then analyzing differences in usage of consonant and vowel types and tokens between the three groups. She will be building on her summer research as she enters her senior year and is considering adding phoneme elongation as a variable of interest. We are so proud of what Sarah has achieved and can’t wait to see what she does next!