Prud’hommeaux is collaborating on the study with Laura Silverman, associate professor of developmental and behavioral pediatrics at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm of Rochester Institute of Technology and Jan van Santen of Oregon Health & Science University will serve as advisors, sharing previously collected data and assisting with experimental design.

The three-year grant, administered by NIH’s National Institutes on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, will fund a clinical study of adults with autism to determine the language and communication style they use when completing a variety of tasks, such as playing a cooperative game, retelling a story, categorizing objects, or describing a picture.

Prud’hommeaux will take the sound recordings from this study and use speech recognition software to create transcriptions. “One of the exciting parts of this projects is that because we are using speech recognition software, we will be able to collect much more data per person to analyze.”

Prud’hommeaux will then be able to automatically identify specific areas where an adult with autism does not communicate in a socially appropriate way or the way in which a neurotypical adult would communicate.

People with autism can miss social cues and subtle ways adults communicate, said Prud’hommeaux.

An adult with autism who wants to give an instruction to someone else might phrase the request in a way that the directive is unclear or communicate it in an atypical manner. For example, someone with autism might say “The person needs to hand over the book,” while a neurologically typical person might say, “Could you please hand me the book?”