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. These projects and additional projects under development are described below.
Subproject 1: Accents and Autism
Our project onaccents 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 onromance 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 seriesLove 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, our research aims to characterize how these terms are spreading and how their original, neurodiversity-forward meanings may be diluted.
Subproject 7: Autistic Social Gaming
Gaming is a common hyperfixation and special interest shared by members of the autistic community, but existing literature on this topic reveals a dearth of neurodiversity-affirming, gaming-positive perspectives; often, games are presented as either risk factors for social withdrawal or tools for neurotypical-normative social skills training. This multi-sited subproject complexifies these premises with ethnographic accounts of the lived experiences of autistic gamers across the simulated worlds ofMinecraft,Roblox, and tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs). Sociolinguistic research methods reveal how these online realms cultivate a sense of community among autistic players, through which they can explore new modes of communication, relationships, and identities.