Graduate student Alyssa Crezee studied sentence processing with the hopes of contributing to one field that’s too often forgotten: autism research.
After reading the sentence “Vanessa got Rick ice cream after losing the friendly bet,” can you tell who lost the bet? A majority of readers assume Vanessa lost the bet based on this sentence alone; but with some added context, Rick could have lost the bet just as easily.
Graduate student Alyssa Crezee (Linguistics MA ’25) learned that even with additional background pointing at Rick as the loser, some individuals will still conclude that Vanessa lost the bet. Building off this knowledge, Crezee decided to study how individuals with and without autistic traits process sentences, hoping to see if autistic traits could be a predictor of comprehension. She believes her research illuminates more than processing differences—it also challenges the notion that differences are deficits.
Understanding Processing
For her research, Crezee first selected sentences with ambiguity, specifically those with a null, or missing, pronoun. Some of the ambiguous sentences were accompanied by background sentences, which Crezee hoped would show a difference in reading comprehension.
For example, if context-building sentences explain that Vanessa and Rick had a bet and that the loser received ice cream, participants would be asked to choose who won the bet using a scale: definitely Vanessa, maybe Vanessa, maybe Rick, or definitely Rick.
All participants read each ambiguous sentence one word at a time, allowing Crezee to collect data on both comprehension and reading speed. The data, combined with results from a follow-up survey measuring participants’ autistic traits, allowed her to look for patterns in sentence comprehension and to see how interpretations changed when additional context was given.
Learning from Differences
Results from both the sentence comprehension portion and the questionnaire gave Crezee insights on the project’s big question: Do the presence or prominence of certain autistic traits impact the processing of ambiguous sentence structures?
Analyzing responses from individuals with and without autistic traits helped Crezee determine that those presenting more traits “are more likely to be biased toward the [original] sentence interpretation, regardless of the context.” Individuals with fewer autistic traits, she continues, “will be more affected by the context,” and thus more likely to accept a different interpretation based on the additional context. She hopes that these preliminary findings will encourage other researchers to join the discussion on autism research.
Above all, Crezee believes this research sheds light on how individuals with autism comprehend the world around them. She encourages individuals to challenge stereotypes regarding disability, noting that every person with autism is unique and that “our picture of autism may not be accurate to every autistic person’s experience.”
Learn more about BYU’s MA in Linguistics program here.