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This project aims to characterize morphosyntactic abilities in racially and ethnically diverse autistic adolescents and young adults with and without language impairment. Specific research questions are: 1) How do morphosyntactic outcomes in terms of percent grammatical outcomes, omission, and wrong tense differ in ASD and ALI? 2) Do these outcomes differ when using unmodified versus strategic scores? 3) Do ASD and ALI differ in semantic acceptability scores, syntactic scores, and semantic-syntactic integration scores?, and 4) How do these scores relate to one another?

This project will evaluate the influence of (1) access to education and services and (2) sense of community on adaptive behaviors, social responsiveness, and self-determination in BIPOC autistic adolescents and young adults after taking into account individual differences in language ability and nonverbal intelligence.

This study aims to investigate the evaluation of applicants to master's speech-language pathology programs in the United States. Respondents will include PhD students/candidates and faculty. They will respond to a survey questionnaire with the following major content blocks: (1) demographics, (2) professional background, and (3) vignettes.

Self-determination plays an important role in outcomes in autism and shows intersectional disparities. Yet, little is known about the role of individual differences or social drivers of health in the development of self-determination. Understanding these factors is key for developing effective supports. This mixed-methods convergent study examined self-determination in racially and ethnically minoritized autistic individuals and caregivers. Participants ages 13 to 30 ( N = 73) varying widely in language and cognitive ability and caregivers ( n =52) completed the Self-Determination Inventory. Autism traits and sense of community predicted caregiver report of self-determination, and autism traits and language predicted self-report of self-determination, consistent with DisCrit and Diversity Science. Self-Determination Inventory interviews of a subset of participants ( n = 13) and caregivers ( n = 9) were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. Themes pointed to the role of the intersection of race and disability in shaping self-determination. Altogether, findings point to the importance of these frameworks, environmental influences, and multi-informant perspectives in characterizing self-determination. Future work should focus on the impact of environmental factors in self-determination in minoritized autistic individuals during the transition to adulthood.

Purpose: Despite the clinical utility of sentence production and sentence repetition to identify language impairment in autism, little is known about the extent to which these tasks are sensitive to potential dialectal variation. One promising method is strategic scoring (Oetting et al., 2016), which has good clinical utility for identifying language impairment in nonautistic school-age children across dialects of English. This report applies strategic scoring to analyze sentence repetition and sentence production in autistic adolescents and adults., Method: Thirty-one diverse autistic adolescents and adults with language impairment (ALI; n =15) and without language impairment (ASD; n =16) completed the Formulated Sentences and Recalling Sentences subtests of the Clinical Evaluation of Language Fundamentals-5 th Ed (Wiig et al., 2013). Descriptive analyses and regression evaluated effects of scoring condition, group, and scoring condition by group on outcomes, as well as group differences in finiteness-marking across utterances and morphosyntactic structures., Results: Strategic and unmodified item-level scores were essentially constant on both subtests and significantly lower in the ALI than the ASD group. Only group predicted item-level scores. Group differences were limited to: percent grammatical utterances on Formulated Sentences and percent production of overt structures combined on Sentence Repetition (ALI < ASD)., Discussion: Findings support the feasibility of strategic scoring for sentence production and sentence repetition to identify language impairment and indicate that potential dialectal variation in finiteness-marking did not confound outcomes in this sample. To better understand the clinical utility of strategic scoring, replication with a larger sample varying in age and comparisons with dialect-sensitive measures are needed., Competing Interests: Conflict of Interest: The authors have no financial or nonfinancial disclosures.