Research Projects

Undergraduate researchers on the ALL Team for 2025-2026 were awarded a Linguistics Undergraduate Research Award (LURA) for their work on the subprojects on accents & autism and romance & autism. For more information on these two projects, follow the links below and read the students' coauthored LURA essay here. Additional projects under development are listed below.

Subproject 1: Accents and Autism

Our project on accents and autism explores the experiences of autistic folks who have adopted ways of speaking that defy the normative expectations of their background. Unlike the popular Spider-Man meme shown here, our work examines this practice as agentive rather than unthinking.

Subproject 2: Romance and Autism

Our project on romance and autism challenges the notion that autistic folks suffer with deficits around the expression of love. As suggested by the popular Autistic Love Languages meme shown here, our research focuses on the underrecognized love languages that are important to autistic life experience (scaffolded by a critical analysis of the US television series Love on the Spectrum).

Subproject 3: Indexical Bleaching of Autistic Terms

The concept of indexical bleaching distinguishes a process by which the indexical links between a linguistic form and its social meanings are weakened or lost as it travels into new contexts. This subproject, spearheaded by undergraduate researcher Adilana Anderson, aims to explore the indexical bleaching of terms like “hyperfixation” and “overstimulation,” which were popularized within online neurodiverse discourse before seeing more general use. Through social media discourse analysis, we aim to characterize how these terms are spreading and how their original, neurodiversity-forward meanings may be diluted.