Measuring Early Communication in Students with Autism

Project Overview

Measuring Early Communication in Students with Autism develops ways to adapt the Communication Complexity Scale (CCS; Brady et al., 2012) to better assess minimally verbal students on autism spectrum in structured and unstructured communication contexts in school.

Roles and Responsibility

As a graduate research assistant on the “Measuring Early Communication in Students with Autism” project, I was responsible for:

Managing a large dataset
Conducting quantitative analysis
Achieving reliability in using the Communication Complexity Scale (CCS; Brady et al., 2012) to observe pre-verbal communication abilities in children
Training school special education specialists on the CCS
Presenting our findings at multiple national and international scientific conferences

Presentations

Suswaram, S., Brady, N. C., & Fleming, K. K. (2020, June). A Comparison of Communication Complexity Scores Across Naturalistic Setting in Children with Minimal Verbal Skills and Autism. International Society for Autism Research Annual Meeting. [Virtual]

Suswaram, S., Fleming, K. K., & Brady, N. C. (2019, November). Do Scores on the Communication Complexity Scale (CCS) differ based on Race and Ethnicity? Presentation at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association convention, Orlando, FL. [In-person]

Brady, N. C., Muller, K., Fleming, K. K., Suswaram, S., & Matthews, K. (2019, May). Measuring Early Communication in Classroom Contexts. International Society for Autism Research convention (INSAR), Montreal, Canada. [In-person]

Fleming, K. K., Brady, N. C., Muller, K., Matthews, K., & Suswaram, S. (2018, April). A Comparison of Communication Complexity Scores in Children with Minimal Verbal Skills and Autism: Naturalistic Language Sample vs. Structured Interaction Protocol. 50th Gatlinburg Conference, San Diego, CA. [In-person]