Dr. Letitia Naigles, a UConn KIDS researcher, is interested in how young children aquire language. Dr. Naigles looks at language development in both typically developing children and children with autism. “My research focuses on the interacting roles of linguistic input and linguistic, cognitive, social, and neurological predispositions in children’s acquisition of word meaning, sentence structure, and discourse patterns” writes Dr. Naigles. One of her most recent publications in the journal Autism Research looks at how brain structure is associated with language ability in preschool-aged boys with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Dr Naigles’ findings  suggest that the strength of the connection between the occipital lobe, which processes what you see, and the temporal lobe, which processes what you hear, is greater in children with larger vocabularies.