Two CLL members, Yasmin Andalib (’24) and Kylie Robinshaw (’24), each received a travel grant from the Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR) to fund their attendance (including poster presentations!) at the upcoming Meeting on Language in Autism (MoLA) in Durham, NC. Yasmin and Kylie will also present their research at the Frontiers in Undergraduate Research Exhibition on April 12-13.

Thanks to OUR for making this trip possible for our talented seniors!

On the afternoon of Wednesday, Nov 1, CLL members Cynthia Boo and Grace Corrigan wore costumes and presented posters at the Psychological Sciences Halloween SPOOKtacular event. Cynthia walked away with the Best Student Costume award for her picture-perfect portrayal of Kiki from Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Grace took home the Best Graduate Poster award for her poster, “Children with ASD improve categorical induction performance over time.” Congratulations to Cynthia and Grace for their awards!

In July, our graduate student Kaya LeGrand successfully defended her masters thesis, “Longitudinal Analysis of Early Verb Production in Typical Development and Autism Spectrum Disorder.” She is now the recipient of a masters in Developmental Psychology from UConn! Congratulations on an excellent thesis and many exciting projects to come, Kaya!

The 18th conference of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) was held in Brussels, Belgium, from July 9-14, and our doctoral candidate Cynthia Boo was in attendance to present a paper! Cynthia spoke in the Discourse and disfluencies in cognitive and speech disorders session, sharing her research entitled “Non-Autistic and Autistic children: Why should I say ‘um’ if I’m not talking to anybody?”

We are so proud to have had the CLL represented at IPrA by Cynthia. Congratulations on a great talk!

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!