Praxis Course: Language Research in Autism
Semester: Spring 2026
Faculty Advisor/Professor: Sarah Conlin
Community Partner: Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
Praxis Site Supervisor: Meg Lyons
Praxis Poster:
PIS Prii Regmi
Further Context:
This semester, I had the opportunity to work at Dr. Julia Parish-Morris’s Social Attention and Language (SoAL) Lab at the Center for Autism Research (CAR) at CHOP. The lab focuses on studying clinical language and social attention in individuals with neurodevelopmental or psychiatric differences, with the goal of better understanding social communication across the lifespan. A key focus of the lab is using tools like natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to study communication, especially in understudied groups such as autistic girls.
My main work in the lab was on the SAGA (Sex and Gender in Autism) study, which looks at early development and sex differences in children. This study examines how autistic and non-autistic children communicate and interact through interviews and conversations, as well as structured research and clinical tasks. Study visits include activities like eye-tracking, parent-child interaction, and friendship questionnaires, along with clinical assessments such as language tests, IQ tests, and autism evaluations. Seeing how all of these pieces come together helped me understand how research can capture both social and clinical aspects of development.
A large part of my role involved transcribing natural language data from interviews and conversations across different studies. These included interactions between participants and clinical research staff, psychologists, parents, and peers across a wide age range. This work required close attention to detail and showed me how complex and nuanced communication can be. I also helped with data entry, organizing information from run-sheets and questionnaires into REDCap while maintaining confidentiality and accuracy.
Beyond these tasks, I had the chance to shadow in-person study visits for the SAGA project, which gave me a better sense of how research is conducted in real clinical settings.
One of the most meaningful parts of this experience was seeing how the SoAL lab focuses on autistic girls as an understudied group. Working on SAGA deepened my interest in research on underrepresented communities and the gaps that still exist. I’vealways been interested in social justice and understanding how structural inequalities affect mental health, and this experience helped connect that to my academic goals. Learning that many diagnostic tools are based mostly on male samples and hence may miss autistic girls, made the work feel especially important and showed me why this research really matters.