Symposium - Shifts in understanding language across the autism spectrum and throughout development
The CRBLM is pleased to present an upcoming symposium on language and autism, featuring talks by Emily Zane (James Madison University), Alexia Ostrolenk (Autism Alliance of Canada/Université de Montréal), and Aparna Nadig (McGill University).
The event will also include a poster session on innovative methods for exploring language and communication across populations (abstract submission still open until May 19th!) and break-out discussion sessions.
When: Tuesday, June 16 , 2026, 9:30am-3:00pm
Where: CRBLM offices (2001 McGill College Avenue, 6th floor)
Lunch and refreshments will be served.
La présentation se fera en anglais mais il sera possible de participer en français via interpretation informelle des questions.
Register here.
Schedule:
9:30-10:00 Coffee reception and welcome
10:00-10:15 Emily Zane — Conceptual framework for the day (important setup to contextualize the three talks)
10:20-11:00 (30 min talk, 10 min Q+A) Alexia Ostrolenk — Atypical routes to language acquisition in autistic children
11:00-11:10 Break
11:10-11:50 Aparna Nadig — Learning language from social input in autism and expressive language strengths in multilingual adolescents
11:50 -1:30 Lunch and networking & Poster session — Innovative methods for exploring language and communication across populations (contributions from the CRBLM community)
1:30-2:10 Emily Zane — Do fluent autistic speakers share a “Linguatype?”
2:10-2:20 Break
2:20-3:00 Break-out discussion sessions: Responding to needs raised by shifts in understanding autistic language at different communication levels
Speakers:
Alexia Ostrolenk (she/her) is a postdoctoral fellow at the Autism Alliance of Canada, in partnership with Unity Health Toronto. In September 2026, she will join the Department of Psychiatry and Addictology at Université de Montréal as an Assistant Professor. Her research focuses on reading and language development in autistic children, with an emphasis on bridging scientific inquiry and real-world practice. An engaged science communicator, she is also the co-founder of ComSciCon-QC, which has provided free science communication training to over 300 francophone graduate students in Quebec since 2020.
Atypical routes to language acquisition in autistic children: How do autistic children come to language? This presentation explores alternative developmental pathways to communication in autism. While language development is often understood as fundamentally social, some autistic children appear to access language through different routes. Drawing on research on early interest in written language and unexpected bilingualism, I examine how some children may enter language through pathways that differ from typical developmental trajectories. These alternative pathways challenge conventional assumptions about how language should develop and call for a shift in intervention practices. Rather than treating these trajectories as deviations to be corrected, they can be understood as meaningful entry points into communication. This perspective highlights the importance of building on children’s existing strengths and interests as a foundation for intervention. It also has practical implications for supporting families, helping them recognize, interpret, and engage with their child’s unique ways of communicating.
Emily Zane is an associate professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. She is a linguist, whose research focuses on language expression, understanding, and processing by older autistic children and adults.
Do fluent autistic speakers share a “Linguatype?”: In traditional accounts of autism, various identifiable features of autistic language – e.g., echolalia – are interpreted as linguistic errors attributable to an underlying language impairment. Even autistic people who speak fluently have sometimes been described as exhibiting a “hidden” or “subclinical” deficit, because their spontaneous language contains relatively frequent unconventional semantic and morphosyntactic features. After quickly reviewing these accounts, I then explore an alternative account, grounded in linguistics, where these semantic and morphosyntactic features are considered as identifiable patterns associated with an autistic “linguatype” (Zane & Grossman, 2024; Zane & Luyster, 2025) – that is, a valid linguistic code shared across autistic speakers – somewhat akin to a dialect. To demonstrate how this reinterpretation drastically changes implications of difference in autistic language use, I specifically apply the framework to one language pattern that has been associated with autism since the earliest accounts of the condition: The relatively frequent creation of invented words (neologisms). I will show how reconsidering autistic neologisms as meaningful lexemes, rather than language mistakes, can yield insights into autistic language and thought.
Aparna Nadig is an Associate Professor at McGill University in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders. Her lab studies language development, social communication and social cognition through an intersectional lens, focusing on people on the autism spectrum as well as neurotypicals, and on bilinguals/minority language speakers. In partnership with autistic collaborators, practitioners, and community organizations, her applied lines of work strive to improve social inclusion for people on the autism spectrum and their families.
Learning language from social input in autism and expressive language strengths in multilingual adolescents
Children on the autism spectrum have highly varied spoken language profiles, with approximately 40% exhibiting skills in the normal range or above. In this talk I will focus on this subgroup of the autism spectrum who have age-expected spoken language skills. Since many other children on the autism spectrum face significant communication challenges, and reduced early social attention is a defining feature of autism, learning from the spoken language input in the child’s social environment may not necessarily be expected. In the first part of the talk I will review work from my and others’ labs on the nature of the language input available to toddlers and preschoolers on the autism spectrum, relative to that of typically-developing children. I will also present evidence indicating that children on the spectrum who have participated in research studies, when examined as a group, do in fact make use of the language they hear, and benefit from lexically rich and syntactically complex input, as do typically developing children.
Learning multiple languages may, on the surface, seem like an even more unlikely possibility in autism, given the aforementioned social and communication challenges. This has lead to a commonly held belief that bilingualism could further delay language development in children on the spectrum; yet a body of research demonstrates that there is no such additional delay. In the second part of the talk, I will review evidence from my and other’s labs showing that this subgroup of children on the spectrum can become proficiently bilingual when adequate language exposure is provided. I will also share recent data from multilingual adolescents showcasing their sophisticated expressive language skills and sharing their self-declared linguistic identity and proficiencies.