Prof. Kira Hall has received a research grant from the , a major international foundation for anthropological research, for her project 鈥淎ccent Imitation on the Autism Spectrum.鈥� The project investigates a phenomenon noted in descriptions of autistic symptoms but rarely discussed in scholarship: the prolonged and often fluent adoption of non-local or 鈥渇oreign鈥� dialect features.聽Drawing from ethnographic interviews with speakers on the autism spectrum who characterize themselves as having an accent, her study examines how autistic individuals understand, navigate, and cultivate their own atypical language practices.聽More specifically, it聽hypothesizes that the adoption of non-local accents may be understood as socially strategic imitation,聽whereby autistic individuals draw from non-local spacetimes and associated language ideologies to聽access forms of intimacy and social meaning unavailable to them due to their communicative聽differences. She will be working on the project with CU Boulder PhD student Ayden Parish, whose dissertation also focuses on questions related to language and neurodiversity.
Congratulations, Kira!