Luyster to Explore How Autistic Parents Communicate with Kids in NSF-Funded Study
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Emerson College and New York University a three-year grant focused on parent language input, and whether autistic and non-autistic parents speak differently when interacting with their children.
The total award is $540,448, with Emerson receiving $240,801 for the project, which was funded by the NSF through the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences. Rhiannon Luyster, a professor in the Communication Sciences and Disorders Department and director of the Lab for Infant + Toddler Language at Emerson (LI+TLE Lab), is the principal researcher responsible for Emerson’s contribution to the project.
Through this research, Luyster will continue to explore the long-term impacts of neurodivergent parents’ linguistic habits in early childhood language development in autistic children, expanding on Dr. Damian Milton’s “double empathy problem” theory, which proposes that communication difficulties between autistic and non-autistic people come from mutual misunderstandings, not just deficits in autistic individuals.
“We hope that this project will give us new appreciation for the experiences of autistic parents with young autistic children,” Luyster said. “The goal is to understand the ways in which their parent-child interactions might support child development.”
Read: Luyster’s Research Shows ‘Focused Interests’ Support Autistic Children’s Language Development
NSF awards are highly competitive, with an overall funding rate ranging from 17 to 19 percent.
“Without this NSF award, we would not have the resources to support our data collection or research staff,” she said. “We are incredibly grateful that the NSF funded this important and innovative project [which is], to our knowledge, the first of its kind.”
Luyster’s past research has been supported by the NSF, the National Institutes of Health, the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the American Philosophical Society, the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, the Organization for Autism Research, and Emerson College.
Read: Luyster Receives $1.67M NIH Grant to Study Language Development
She is the author of the Toddler Module of the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule – 2nd Edition (ADOS-2), and has published her work in several peer-reviewed journals, including Developmental Psychology; Development & Psychopathology; Journal of Child Language; Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research; Autism Research; and Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
Her passion for teaching has been widely recognized at Emerson. She received the Emerson College Alumni Award for Teaching Innovation (2016), the Huret Faculty Excellence Award (2021), and the Norman and Irma Mann Stearns ’67 Distinguished Faculty Award (2023).
For current Emerson students interested in her field of study, Luyster teaches graduate courses on research methods and autism, as well as an undergraduate course on developmental psychology.
Written by Leah Shosteck ’25, MFA ’26 for the Office of Research and Creative Scholarship
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