Focus of lab:

Emily Zane is a psycholinguist whose research focuses on how language behaviors interact with other areas of cognition; how human beings use, understand, and acquire language; and what those processes tell us about the human mind. The research conducted in the ReAL Lab specifically focuses on patterns of language use, understanding, processing, and acquisition by autistic people. She believes that understanding the linguistic code used by autistic individuals may help to forestall the “double empathy problem” (Milton, 2012), which proposes that unsatisfactory cross-neurotype interactions result from communication differences on both sides (i.e., non-autistic people struggle to understand autistic people and vice versa).

"My research uses eye-tracking, ERP, and behavioral measures to examine language acquisition, use, processing and understanding by autistic individuals across the lifespan. I am particularly interested in how differences in language use/understanding between neurotypes may contribute to the “Double Empathy” problem, yielding miscommunication and misunderstanding during inter-neurotype discourse."

Current Projects

• How autistic and non-autistic individuals use, interpret, and process referential terms and prepositions
• How autistic and non-autistic individuals use, interpret, and process various forms of discourse, including conversation and narratives
• How multi-modal processing affects lexical acquisition for autistic and non-autistic children
• How playing collaborative videogames can foster cross-neurotype and between-neurotype friendships for autistic and non-autistic children
• An up-to-date list of ReAL Lab projects, including copies of poster presentations, can be found on Dr. Zane’s ResearchGate page (link: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Emily-Zane)

Publications

• An up-to-date list of ReAL Lab publications can be found on Dr. Zane’s Google Scholar profile (link: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=YslOlYQAAAAJ&hl=en)