Amazing news! Big congrats Ambra!! Looking forward to seeing what comes out of your lab:)

Thanks Wim!

I'm excited about the research we'll be doing, but also the impact that I hope it will have on creating more equitable access to healthcare for autistic adults. And to be doing something so cross-disciplinary with physical therapy / healthcare science.
Looking forward to sharing more soon..!

The project will run for the next two years, and we'll be using qualitative analysis, multimodal video analysis, and experiments (all developed in dialog with autistic advisors) to develop an autism education workshop and "communication toolbox" for physical therapists.

Thrilled to have been awarded an AUF Impact Call grant to start researching how we can improve communication between healthcare professionals and autistic adults 🥳 The project is a collab with Hedwig van der Meer and takes a multimodal, cross-disciplinary approach www.auf.nl/gedeelde-con...
🧵👇

Happy to return to Orléans to take part in the Interaction and Inclusion workshop yesterday, talking about sign language recogniton.
Many interesting and inspiring talks from perspectives I haven't seen before!
Thanks for the invitation and your hospitality Katja Ploog & @biagioursi.bsky.social !

what's the point of writing this? arguing (also to myself) that i) exploration is good, it doesn't need to lead to outputs! ii) models/research fail! and that can be insightful! but also if not insightful, that's still how research works! iii) sharing curiosity-driven efforts and excitement!

Assistant Professor, Associate Professor or Full Professor of Cognitive Science - Vacancy at Aarhus University Vacancy at School of Communication and Culture - Linguistics, Cognitive Science and Semiotics, Dept. of, Aarhus University

CogSci in Aarhus is hiring, open rank (assi, asso or full prof).
We want somebody working on and teaching computational modelling of cognitive processes and/or social processes. Students are amazing, work/life balance very satisfactory, and colleagues are nice!

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Ah cool! I'm curious what responses you get. It's certainly handy to have available, I imagine, especially for people more comfortable with R. Can't comment on how it compares to other options of course:)

I just use python for this. Pympi package for reading the .EAFs, collect and organize what I need in python, and then export to .csv and continue in R. I've been curious about the R packages as well, but I'm so comfortable with my python->R workflow I haven't gotten around to trying😅

Usually 3), although using parselmouth to load them directly into python so I can compile a data frame, do any gap/overlap calculations, etc. Then over to R for stats. And then plenty of cycling back to ELAN to look again at specific data points

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This sounds very cool! Looking forward to reading it

Very sad!

That would be very interesting to look at! Nothing came of it though?

Unfortunately, while autism in adulthood is already a much smaller field than in childhood, there's really very little research on aging in autism.
Trying to set up a project involving APD, hearing loss, and neurodivergence though, so hopefully I can say more on this some day!

Thanks Riccardo! I would guess that hearing loss would make it worse, since it typically affects SNR. But I imagine it would depend on the type of hearing loss, as wearing Loops for example reduces everything, but thereby really helps understanding speech in noise.

I just reposted! Here's the link: doi.org/10.1177/1362...
And indeed, the overlap between APD and neurodivergence is super interesting. Seems fairly recognized in children, but then (seemingly) ignored in autistic adults. But it definitely seems to be a common, and persistent, challenge!

Autistic adults, regardless of whether clinically dx or self-identifying, report more difficulty processing auditory information, particularly others' speech.
doi.org/10.1177/1362...

New research by Elena Silva, Linda Drivers
@lindadrijvers.bsky.social
and myself
(reposting with correct link)

I'm posting about this because Elena is not on Bluesky, but she was the one doing most of the work, as this was her masters thesis project. I personally wanted to see a project like this for a while so im excited it finally became reality! Thanks Elena!

Why are these results interesting? I hope it brings awareness to those who may not realize this is a common challenge and not something they are struggling with alone. More research can also bring better understanding of the underlying issues so we can think about how to accommodate these challenges

The lack of difference between self identifying and clinically diagnosed individuals is likely due to statistical power. But the equivalence tests shows the importance of digging into this further, as those who self identify are also reporting similar experiences to those with a clinical dx

What about the self-identifying group? They also differed significantly from nonautistic adults in the Speech domain. But interestingly, equivalence tests showed that their reports were statistically equivalent to the clinically diagnosed group! Indeed, plotting the group predictions highlights this

Plot showing distributions of responses across the four domains of the SSQ, with colours in each panel indicating the participant group.

We found that, across all domains of the SSQ (spatial perception, quality of sound, and speech understanding), the clinically diagnosed group reported more difficulties than the nonautistic group.

We used the Speech, Spatial and Qualities of Hearing Scale (SSQ) as a simple, short survey to see whether autistic adults indeed report lower auditory processing abilities than non autistic adults. We surveyed both clinically-diagnosed individuals and those who self-identify as autistic.

Differences in sensory processing between autistic and nonautistic people are well known, I think, in general terms. But I've heard anecdotes for quite a while that autistic people find speech processing, particularly in noise, very challenging. But there didn't seem to be much evidence for it.

The Speech, Spatial and Qualities of Hearing Scale (SSQ) The Speech, Spatial and Qualities of Hearing Scale (SSQ) is designed to measure a range of hearing disabilities across several domains. Particular attention is given to hearing speech in a variety ...La Escala de Audición para el Lenguaje, la Audición Espacial y las Cualidades Auditivas (SSQ) está disen˜ada para medir un rango de discapacidades auditivas en varios ámbitos. Se da atención partic...

Autistic adults,regardless of whether clinically dx or self-identifying, report more difficulty processing auditory information, particularly others' speech.
doi.org/10.1080/1499...

New research by Elena Silva, Linda Drivers @lindadrijvers.bsky.social and myself
🧵

Very cool! More evidence that passive, or even just non-interactive tasks just aren't going to get us the whole picture if we want to understand a typically interactive phenomenon, like language use

There are a lot of barriers associated with getting a diagnosis, and doubts about whether it's worthwhile. This is a really nice overview of why it *can* be worthwhile to get that confirmation

This really gives some fresh motivation that we are contributing something meaningful to the research community. We'll keep working to make multimodal research methods free to read, free to use, free to learn, and free to build upon. (Thanks for that excellent quote @babajideowoyele.bsky.social !)