Inge-Marie Eigsti
University of Connecticut, CT·Psychology
Conversation is how people make friends, do schoolwork and get jobs, yet there are few good ways to measure what makes a conversation succeed. Standard language tests check vocabulary and grammar, but they miss the back-and-forth machinery of real talk: taking turns, saying "mm-hmm" to show you are listening, using pronouns the other person can follow, and gradually matching a partner's word choices, sentence structures and sounds.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
autism spectrum disorder
conversation
pragmatic language
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Compare how well standardized language test scores versus naturalistic psycholinguistic measures — turn-taking, pause duration, pitch, prosodic range and linguistic alignment — predict objectively and subjectively defined conversational success in 12–15-year-olds.
- Test the double empathy prediction that conversational success differs between neurotype-concordant pairs (autistic–autistic, neurotypical–neurotypical) and neurotype-discordant pairs (autistic–neurotypical).
- Measure conversational success objectively using a collaborative picture task in which partners talk to find five differences, scoring the number and speed of correct identifications.
- Use machine learning on the combined acoustic, linguistic, perceptual and standardized data from 560 adolescents to build predictor networks and cluster participants into conversational profiles that inform personalized supports.
More about the research
This matters especially in autism: about 70% of autistic people score in the typical range on standardized language and cognitive tests, yet still experience frequent communication breakdowns that affect social, educational and work outcomes. The double empathy theory proposes that these breakdowns are failures of mutual understanding between two people rather than a deficit in the autistic person alone — which predicts that difficulty depends on who is talking with whom.
Why it matters
Many autistic teenagers pass standard language tests yet still struggle to be understood, and clinicians currently lack measures that capture this. By defining markers of conversational success in real interactions, the work could yield clinically usable profiles of each adolescent's communication strengths and weaknesses, which clinicians and educators could use to tailor supports. Findings may also show that difficulty depends on the pairing, shifting responsibility for communication breakdowns from the autistic individual to the dyad.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Chung Yin Joseph Lau
Northwestern University, IL·Neuroscience
Test whether the balance between top-down expectation signals and local speech representations is disrupted in autism, using EEG to measure context-dependent processing of speech sounds.
Meghan Swanson
University of Minnesota, MN·Psychology
Test whether infants with asymptomatic congenital CMV have less organized brain white matter than control infants from the HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study, using multi-shell diffusion MRI.
Margaret Reynolds
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Measure gains in visual acuity, using Teller acuity testing, in children with autism spectrum disorder after refractive surgery for refractive error that glasses cannot address.
The school
University of Connecticut: 31 labs on PI Pages, $434M a year on research, 360 research doctorates a year.
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