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Language and Neurodevelopmental Trajectories Lab

(Directed by Dr. Eileen Haebig)

In the Language NeT Lab we examine how children with neurodevelopmental disorders develop language. Within neurodevelopmental disorders, our lab primarily focuses on language abilities in autistic children and children with developmental language disorder (DLD, also frequently referred to as specific language impairment, SLI). Although each group has unique features, we have learned that there are also areas of overlap. We also are interested in examining how language features within and across groups change over time. The Language NeT Lab employs a multi-level approach to address our overarching research questions. As such, research studies incorporate behavioral coding, eye tracking, language sample analysis, and event related brain potentials (ERPs) to examine language learning and processing in children with neurodevelopmental disorders. The ultimate goal of the Language NeT Lab is to gain insight into evidence-based approaches to support clinical assessment and intervention.

Click here for a video tour of the lab and research description.

Lab Accomplishments

Dr. Haebig received a federal research grant from the National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD -- R21 Early Career Researcher award). The studies that are associated with this grant will examine whether retrieval practice (which involves testing newly learned information) promotes word learning in autistic children better than re-studying. Our recent work has documented that retrieval practice helps preschool children with typical development and preschool children with language disorders to learn new words. We will apply similar procedures to examine whether retrieval practice promotes word learning and generalization in autistic children between 4 and 10 years of age.
Dr. Haebig received an LSU Provost grant to bring researchers to LSU to discuss NIH grant writing as a joint effort the with LSU MIND.
One of our PhD students, Fatema Mitu, published her research on word learning and social word features and will present this research at the Meeting on Language in Autism soon (Mitu & Haebig, 2026).
PhD student, Fatema Mitu, and Dr. Haebig were selected for the ASHA Research Mentoring-Pair Travel Award for the ASHA 2026 Convention.
A new PhD student joined the lab recently. Welcome, Tao Kang!!!
Dr. Tengwen Fan and Dr. Stan West recently successfully defended their dissertations and graduate with their PhDs from LSU! They are moving on to exciting new opportunities!
Dr. Haebig was selected for an oral presentation at the Symposium on Research in Child Language Disorders in June 2026. She shared research about the lab's novel adjective learning study. In this presentation, we found emerging evidence that autistic children, like neurotypical children and children with developmental language disorder, also benefit from retrieval practice when learning new words. We are excited to publish this work soon!

Recent Research Findings

Retrieval Practice and Word Learning: In recently published studies, we have documented that children learn best when they are asked to retrieve the new information that they have been taught (e.g., "What's this one called again?" -- retrieval practice). Importantly, the best learning occurs when there is a delay between when children are taught new information and when they are asked to retrieve it. Although it's harder to remember what you have been taught when there's a delay between learning and retrieval practice, this delayed retrieval practice leads to optimal learning! So far, we have documented this finding in preschool children with typical language development and preschool children with developmental language disorders.
Early Word Learning & The Language Environment: In a recent publication, Dr. Haebig and Dr. Christopher Cox applied computational modeling techniques to demonstrate that young children learn new words based on semantic information that they are exposed to in their learning environment (e.g., through interactions with adults). In the publication, they also shared a large database that they collected to measure the relationship among words. Importantly, this database measures adult-oriented word-to-word relationships and child-oriented word-to-word relationships, which differ because adults change the way that they speak when talking to young children. This work was recentlyexpanded to examine how autistic and non-autistic children grow their vocabulary knowledge.
Gesture Processing in Autistic and Non-Autistic Adults: In a in-press publication, Brianna Cairney, Stanley West, Dr. Haebig, Dr. Christopher Cox, and Dr. Heather Lucas examined how autistic and non-autistic adults processed iconig gestures and nonsense gestures. The study revealed that autistic and non-autistic adults rated gesture meaningfulness similarly; however, the autistic adults provided more varied one-word descriptions of the gestures. These findings suggest that gesture processing is similar in the two groups and that lexical rather than semantic level differences underlie the group difference finding. We are sharing the gesture video databse and accompanyung nomring data on the Open Science Framework.
- Cairney, West, Haebig, Cox & Lucas (2023) Behavior Research Methods

What Our Lab is Up To

The Language NeT lab members are currently working with researchers in LSU's Kinesiology and Music Departments to explore how parent-child interactions change during music-based sessions.

LSU Language NeT lab members are also participating in several community events!